Sage Intacct ERP Playbook for Healthcare CFOs: How to Power Data-Driven, Value-Based Care

Why it matters

Healthcare CFOs must adapt to value-based care to ensure financial stability, improve patient outcomes and navigate regulatory shifts.

• Align financial strategy with care outcomes: Sage Intacct helps track KPIs, manage risk and optimize costs in a value-based care environment.
• Enhance operational efficiency: Automate workflows, integrate data and streamline processes to improve decision-making and reduce administrative burdens.
• Future-proof your organization: Stay ahead of regulatory changes, payer demands and financial risks with real-time insights and scalable technology.

Driving Value-Based Care With Sage Intacct

As a healthcare finance leader, you’re constantly balancing competing demands, from aligning with clinicians on patient care to controlling operating costs to meeting rising demands for data and information.

Following the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) in July 2025, significant payment challenges are imminent. Government and commercial payers are now accelerating the move from fee-for-service to value-based care as an alternative payment model to offset the bill’s spending reductions.

Value-based care (VBC) is a healthcare delivery model that reimburses providers based on patient health outcomes rather than service volume, often through fixed, capitated or bundled payments. VBC and its financial counterpart value-based reimbursement (VBR) aim to reduce costs through improved patient outcomes and by focusing KPIs, such as cash flow at risk, uncompensated care of Medicaid patients and increased emergency room volume. But these models also introduce financial risks so you must have a system for predicting future trends and monitoring cost controls.

Small-to-midsized healthcare organizations — like senior living facilities, safety net hospitals, rural clinics and primary care providers — are grappling with unique challenges under OBBBA. Providers with lower reimbursements, particularly those with high Medicaid volume or fewer patients, may struggle to absorb lower margins. Limited resources and the demand for holistic, preventive care can strain revenue, forcing many to navigate skyrocketing expenses while striving to keep care affordable.

The shift from volume to value pricing is upending traditional financial models, with at-risk reimbursements and new performance criteria redefining care delivery. Medicaid cuts, reduced federal grants, staffing shortages, rising expenses and supply chain disruptions intensify the risks. Strategic and future-focused financial leaders must proactively assess the viability of critical care access and service locations.

Outdated or disconnected technology can compound these challenges. Legacy tools often lack the visibility, automation, interconnectivity and analytics you need to track and improve KPIs. And you can’t improve what you can’t measure. Staying ahead of payer expectations, regulatory changes and financial pressures means you need to invest in advanced healthcare technology that connects your clinical, financial and operational data. Your technology should work for you — not limit access to critical insights.

This playbook shows how implementing a core enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution like Sage Intacct can help you navigate the shift to VBC, solve your toughest challenges, deliver optimal patient care and bolster your organization’s longevity.

• Value-Based Care Demands a New Operational and Financial Strategy
• How an ERP Powers the Key Drivers of Value-Based Success
• Why Forward-Thinking Healthcare Leaders Choose Sage Intacct
• 4 Challenges Sage Intacct for Healthcare Solves
• How to Get More Value From a Connected Tech Ecosystem
• Tips for Building a Modern Healthcare Tech Stack

Value-Based Care Demands a New Operational and Financial Strategy

As value-based payment models gain traction, healthcare organizations must continue to deliver exceptional care, while also absorbing more financial risk when outcomes fall short or costs run high. Success depends on adopting new integrated human and machine operating processes, improving patient health, managing costs and demonstrating results with data — not just on service volume.

The shift to VBC calls for a new kind of leadership — one that bridges clinical performance with financial strategy, delivers clear, connected insights and uses real-time data to guide bold, big-picture decisions. To do this, you need tools that go beyond spreadsheets and static reports so you can track metrics, respond to trends and shape your organization’s future.

How an ERP Powers the Key Drivers of Value-Based Care Success

Building a financial strategy for value-based care starts with aligning your ERP to VBC core principles. Here’s how an enterprise application like Sage Intacct can help you translate VBC foundations into practical, data-driven strategies:

Patient-centered outcomes

Tracking outcome-based KPIs like readmissions, chronic condition management and patient satisfaction is non-negotiable. This ERP helps you stay ahead of these metrics by giving you real-time visibility and tying them directly to financial and operational performance. Monitoring these KPIs helps you identify trends, intervene earlier and, ultimately, prevent avoidable rehospitalization and other care costs, contributing to a better overall patient experience.

Cost efficiency

Sage Intacct supports detailed analysis of cost-per-case and cost-per-patient data, helping you spot inefficiencies and protect margins more effectively. It also supports price transparency by making it easier to report and communicate the true cost of care to patients and payers.

Data and analytics

With AI-enhanced dashboards and dimensional reporting, the system can help forecast trends, uncover patterns and guide strategy. This level of insight supports both clinical and financial decision-making and adjusting operations as needed. It can also indirectly support hybrid care models by providing insights into how different types of care, like virtual or in-person visits, are performing so you can decide what works best for your patients and your budget.

Care coordination

Aligning financial and operational data across departments and care settings supports care coordination between providers, specialists and facilities, while maintaining a clear view of financial performance. For example, Sage Intacct links your scheduling and accounting systems, syncing appointments, staffing and billing to reduce administrative friction and support a smoother experience for patients and care teams. This functionality will enhance your revenue cycle processes.

Risk sharing

As your organization takes on more financial risk with VBC, it becomes critical to understand how performance is rewarded based on payer contracts and where to make adjustments. You must be able to depend upon your ERP system to provide the data needed to plan for and account for any cost and revenue outliers.

Why Forward-Thinking Healthcare Leaders Choose Sage Intacct

Sage Intacct for Healthcare is designed for small-to-midsized organizations like senior care facilities, federally qualified health centers, physician groups and outpatient services. Here’s why healthcare CFOs in this space trust Sage Intacct to lead them through the shift to alternative payment models:

• Quick ROI: Get up and running quickly and see measurable value fast. The system is designed for rapid implementation and focuses on configuration instead of custom coding, so teams start seeing results without long setup times. Also, streamlining data conversion from your current system to Sage Intacct is a very efficient process. This flexibility is especially valuable when adapting to rapidly changing reimbursement models and operational disruptions.
• Multi-entity consolidations and dimensional reporting: View performance across locations and services lines, even when those lines span multiple service locations or levels. Track performance by department, payer, provider, location or service type without creating a chart of accounts for every variable. This level of visibility helps you mitigate risk and respond quickly to economic outliers and market changes.
• Built-in automation: Automate invoice entry, simplify processes and cut your accounts payable (AP) processing time in half. Sage Intacct uses built-in AI that learns and adapts to your workflows.
• Flexible payment structures: Sage Intacct supports applying a single payment across multiple accounts, which can be useful for scenarios like shared family billing in senior care or when one payer covers multiple patients. This approach helps simplify accounts receivable (AR) processes and reduces the administrative steps involved in managing complex billing scenarios as part of your revenue cycle.
• Smarter budgeting and forecasting: Use AI-driven data analytics to budget smarter and forecast patient behaviors, preferences and needs. This data helps you make quick adjustments in response to disruption and allow for alternative forecasting.
• HIPAA compliance and security: Protect sensitive financial and patient data with built-in HIPAA compliance, audit trails and role-based access controls. Because Sage Intacct is a cloud-native solution, it handles encryption and updates automatically, helping reduce the burden on your IT security team and minimizing the need for in-house infrastructure maintenance. If you need enhanced oversight, the optional Advanced Audit Trail add-on provides detailed tracking of personal data to support compliance and due diligence.
• AICPA and HFMA recognition: Proven and trusted to meet the unique demands of the healthcare industry, Sage Intacct is the only healthcare financial system endorsed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the Healthcare Financial Management Association.
• Growth without disruption: Whether you’re expanding services or navigating mergers and acquisitions, Sage Intacct helps standardize financial and clinical data across entities. This standardization simplifies due diligence, enhances combined data analytics, reduces redundancies and ensures consistent reporting and compliance, without slowing down operations.

4 Challenges Sage Intacct for Healthcare Solves

As VBC becomes the healthcare industry standard, your finance team must overcome daily challenges to deliver efficient, high-quality care, meet payer expectations and keep your organization financially healthy. Here’s how Sage Intacct can help you solve them:

1. Challenge: Adapting to VBC and VBR models
   Disconnected systems and outdated tools make it difficult to access accurate data quickly. If you‘re still using legacy software like QuickBooks, it may be limiting your ability to manage complex data, generate timely insights and meet the performance metrics required by VBC and VBR models.
   Solution: Modernize your financial infrastructure
   Turn financial challenges into opportunities and align your operations with new reimbursement models to boost both patient and financial health. Sage Intacct automates workflows, integrates financial, operational and clinical data and provides immediate performance insights. This helps you track key metrics, manage risk and align your financial strategy with care outcomes, ensuring adaptability to a value-based care environment.
2. Challenge: Navigating financial uncertainty and external cost pressures
   Global supply chain disruptions and tariffs on imported goods, like pharmaceutical raw materials, are driving up costs. This makes it harder to assess risk, adjust budgets and allocate resources effectively. Without advanced analytics and scenario planning tools, it’s difficult to respond effectively to sudden changes.
   Solution: Use predictive insights to turn data into decisions
   Predictive insights and real-time dashboards can help you create a buffer for disruptions. You can easily add new vendor information to address supply chain challenges. With Sage Intacct’s flexible reporting, you can create more accurate budgets and make faster, well-informed decisions.
3. Challenge: Difficulty measuring care quality and demonstrating impact
   Measuring and reporting key quality metrics like patient satisfaction, care outcomes and cost efficiency can be tough. Without a clear way to measure impact, it’s harder to meet payer expectations or improve performance.
   Solution: Simplify outcome reporting with connected insights
   Connect clinical, operational and financial data to easily track and report on the metrics that matter most. With all your data in one place, you can monitor care quality, patient outcomes and cost trends in real time. This not only helps you demonstrate value to payers and stakeholders but also simplifies reimbursement reviews. When defending denials or resubmitting claims, having the right data at your fingertips makes it easier to justify care decisions and recover revenue that might otherwise be lost.
4. Challenge: Keeping up with constant regulatory and payer changes
   Reimbursement models are shifting fast, and compliance requirements can feel like a moving target, especially with systems that are slow to adapt.
   Solution: Stay ahead with compliance tools
   Simplify compliance with a flexible architecture and on-demand reporting tools that help you adapt to regulatory updates and payer requirements. You can configure reports to match evolving contracts, generate audit-ready documentation and track changes over time to support internal reviews or external audits. Built-in audit trails and HIPAA-compliant security features, like role-based access and automatic encryption, protect sensitive data without extra hassle — so you can respond to new rules or payer model changes without slowing down your operations.

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How to Get More Value From a Connected Tech Ecosystem

Your healthcare organization typically relies on multiple systems to manage its clinical operations, patient engagement, billing, payroll, scheduling and compliance. If these systems don’t communicate, your team ends up relying on manual workarounds and losing key data in the process.

A connected tech ecosystem eliminates these gaps, allowing platforms to work together and giving you instant access to critical financial and operational data. Centralizing your financials with Sage Intacct enhances efficiency, accuracy and responsiveness.

The ERP integrates financial management, reporting and automation with systems you already use. Whether you’re managing multiple facilities, navigating payer contracts and government compliance or tracking care costs, a connected tech ecosystem helps you build a single source of truth and simplifies operations.

Integrating other key systems? No problem

A central ERP like Sage Intacct gives you a strong foundation for your healthcare operations. Adding specialized systems for clinical care, HR and compliance ensures smooth data flow and keeps your teams working together with consistent data.

Here’s how a well-integrated healthcare tech stack comes together:

• Sage Intacct as your cornerstone: This ERP system acts as the heart of your operations, managing core functions like accounting, reporting, budgeting and automation to support operational efficiency and informed decision-making.
• Electronic medical records (EMR) systems: Integrate easily with platforms like Epic or Cerner to connect clinical and financial data for better cost tracking, care coordination and reimbursement analysis.
• Payroll and HR systems: Sync with payroll software like ADP or Paycom to simplify workforce management, track labor costs and support compliance with labor regulations.
• Billing and revenue cycle management platforms: Connect with claims processing and payment reconciliation systems like Waystar or Optum to improve billing accuracy, reduce denials and accelerate collections.
• CRM systems: Connect with platforms like Salesforce Health Cloud or Microsoft Dynamics to manage patient relationships, referral sources and outreach efforts. Linking your customer relationship management system (CRM) with Sage Intacct helps align financial and engagement data, giving you a clearer view of patient acquisition costs, referral trends and payer interactions.

Tips for Building a Modern Healthcare Tech Stack

To compete in value-based care, your systems need to talk to each other — and work for each other. Here are some key best practices to get started:

• Start with a core ERP
  Begin by choosing a flexible, cloud-based ERP like Sage Intacct to centralize your financial data and simplify operations.
• Prioritize interoperability: Make sure your ERP integrates easily with your EMR, billing, payroll, scheduling and other systems.
• Automate where it counts
  Use AI and automation for billing, reporting and approvals to reduce error rates and free up your team for higher-value work.
• Plan for long-term support
  Your tech stack should start with future growth in mind. Choose implementation providers who offer training and managed services to keep your system evolving in lockstep with your healthcare organization’s needs.

Accelerate Your Transition to Value-Based Care With Sage Intacct

The shift to value-based care isn’t slowing down, and neither should you. As a leading healthcare consultant and premier Sage Intacct partner for over 10 years, we’ve helped small and medium-sized healthcare organizations with rapid implementations and ongoing support. Learn more about what powers ERP project success and explore how our award-winning Sage Intacct experts can help you get the most ROI from your implementation.