Winning with Analytic-Driven Strategy
In the early 2000s, baseball’s Oakland Athletics did something extraordinary. With one of the lowest payrolls in Major League Baseball, they built a playoff team by using advanced analytics and creative thinking to find hidden value in players that others overlooked. The story became known as “Moneyball” – and it revolutionized how sports teams think about strategy, talent, and competition.
Today, health systems find themselves in a similar position. Resources are constrained, competition is intense, and every decision – from where to invest capital to how to attract patients and providers – carries outsized impact. Springboard’s experience shows that success doesn’t always come from having the biggest financial investments – it comes from using analytics and creative thinking to uncover hidden opportunities, making informed decisions, and measuring everything.
Why “Moneyball” Matters in Healthcare
Healthcare marketing and strategy leaders are tasked with not only growing preference, loyalty, and volumes but also producing a positive ROI. That’s why the Moneyball mindset is so powerful:
- It reframes the problem from “We don’t have enough resources” to “We can get more value from the resources we do have.”
- It shifts decision-making from intuition and legacy to analytic-driven prioritization.
- It creates a competitive advantage not by spending more, but by spending smarter.
Moneyball thinking doesn’t mean redesigning everything from scratch — it means reimagining how to use what you already have more effectively. The opportunity is not only in analyzing profit potential but also in surfacing where systems are missing growth opportunities and hidden inefficiencies.
Applying Moneyball Principles to Health Systems
For hospitals and health systems, Moneyball thinking means re-examining how marketing and strategy investments are made — and building a team around analytics and innovation.
- Measure What Actually Drives Growth.
Too often, success is measured in vanity metrics – likes, impressions, awareness, and preference. A Moneyball approach examines leading indicators of growth, such as shifts in service line volume, in-migration patterns, or referral leakage. These are the “on-base percentages” of healthcare.
It also means re-educating executive leadership teams on new measures of success and building intimate partnerships with finance leaders to understand the economics of service line profitability. For example, what is the expected net revenue per case? Aligning marketing and finance creates a shared scoreboard for sustainable growth.
- Identify Undervalued Opportunities.
Just as the A’s found value in players overlooked by others, health systems can uncover hidden growth by focusing on areas competitors often ignore:
- Under-marketed service lines such as rehabilitation, imaging, or preventive care.
- Community segments with unmet needs.
- Patient navigation and access improvements that remove friction from care.
These opportunities extend beyond service lines into systemic gaps:
- Medication non-adherence costs the U.S. health system an estimated $100–$500 billion annually, driving higher hospitalizations, readmissions, and ER visits (NIH, CMS, JMCP, Duke Health).
- Missed appointments are estimated to cost the system $150 billion annually, with each no-show resulting in an average loss of $200 per physician per hour (TransLoc).
- Transportation barriers prevented 5.8 million Americans from receiving timely care in 2017, with missed care rates ranging from 3% to 67% depending on the population (NIH).
Each represents a Moneyball opportunity: hidden but addressable factors that drive cost, loyalty, and outcomes.
Barriers to Playing “Moneyball” with Health Systems
Adopting a Moneyball approach isn’t without challenges. Common barriers include:
- Data silos between marketing, clinical, and finance teams.
- Lagging indicators, like market share, that don’t provide real-time insights.
- Cultural resistance to replacing intuition with analytics.
- Resource constraints in building an advanced analytics infrastructure.
But one of the most significant barriers is mindset – confusing redesigning with reimagining. Moneyball doesn’t aim to help organizations do the wrong things more efficiently — it helps them reimagine how to deploy data, people, and processes toward smarter outcomes.
Healthcare also has an aversion to failure — a mindset shaped by its clinical culture, where mistakes can have real consequences. But innovative business disciplines view failure differently: as a crucial building block to learning and growth. As Henry Ford said, “There is no failure except in no longer trying.”
It’s essential to note that you don’t need a perfect analytics system to start – you just need to start. Start by prioritizing metrics that matter and building momentum around evidence-based wins.
The question is – are you ready to step up to the plate?
Let’s talk.
To set up a time to discuss your brand’s strategic opportunities, please contact me at mike@springboardbrand.com