Quality Data Drives Key Decisions for Knute Nelson

Between the ever-changing healthcare landscape, talent shortage, and incoming wave of the aging baby boomer population, efficiency is key to doing more with less and allowing organizations to provide care to the senior population for years to come.

Knute Nelson is a full-spectrum nonprofit organization serving the senior community in Minnesota and North Dakota. Knute Nelson’s mission—to enrich the lives of everyone they serve—extends from patients and the community to their employees. With 1,100+ staff members supporting a full continuum of care ranging from senior living facilities, wellness and rehabilitation, home health, and hospice, Knute Nelson enriched over 8,500 lives in 2022.

Keeping such a multi-faceted organization operating at peak performance is no easy feat. Knute Nelson turned to their long-time audit and tax partner, Eide Bailly, for help. Our healthcare and technology consulting teams worked together to increase efficiency, reduce manual processes, increase visibility, and empower their employees to make decisions based off of real-time data.

Before we started working with Eide Bailly, all our data was within spreadsheets. We had multiple software that we were using, from our financial software to our clinical billing software to our payroll and HR software. We were looking for something to bring all that data together in real-time into one location and give us a dashboard that could make us more of a data-driven organization.

Marnie Gugisberg, Chief Financial Officer

Because of the changing healthcare environment, if we don’t know our data, we’re actually going to be behind. We want to be at the forefront of everything that we do, and being data driven is part of that.

Marnie Gugisberg, Chief Financial Officer

Knute Nelson needed a system that could bring all of their data into one custom, scalable platform that would meet the needs of all users. Our specialized healthcare and technology teams worked together with Knute Nelson to identify KPIs for each department and the organization and ensure the metrics chosen matched the desired business outcomes.

Their BI dashboards combine financial data, sales and operating data, employee data, and clinical data to tell a story that Knute Nelson can use to:

• Track admission and referral trends
• Create projections and forecasts
• Recognize patterns
• Measure growth rates
• Track key performance indicators

“Ultimately,” says Marnie Gugisberg, CFO, “anytime we make a decision, we check the dashboards to make sure our decision is supported by the data.”