CHICAGO, Oct. 22, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Strata Decision Technology welcomed healthcare finance leaders this week to LIFT25: The Strata Users Virtual Summit, held October 21–23. The annual event brought together professionals from hospitals, health systems, and healthcare organizations nationwide to share strategies for improving performance and resilience in an era of rising costs, labor shortages, and mounting financial pressure.
“At LIFT25, we’re gathering healthcare finance leaders to share the ideas, challenges, and innovations shaping the future,” said John Martino, Chief Executive Officer at Strata Decision Technology. “Strata is deeply committed to helping our customers make smarter, faster decisions through data, analytics, and AI. One of our key roles, today and into the future, is to support these organizations as they navigate uncertainty. We want to provide the innovations and collaboration they need to plan with insight, respond with agility, and build a more resilient future for the communities they serve.”
Uniting AI, Data, and Intelligence for Healthcare’s Future
A central focus of this year’s virtual user conference is how artificial intelligence (AI) and data are transforming healthcare financial management. Strata leaders showcased ways the company is integrating advanced analytics, predictive modeling, and automation across its StrataJazz®, Axiom®, and Data & Intelligence platforms.
Jonathan Adams, Chief Technology Officer, outlined how Strata’s One Data Platform initiative — built on the Snowflake AI data cloud — is creating one of the largest, most comprehensive financial datasets in U.S. healthcare. The initiative combines financial, operational, clinical, and claims data into a single cloud-based source of truth, enabling faster, more reliable, and actionable insights.
“By unifying our data in the cloud, we’re helping healthcare leaders connect insight to action,” Adams said. “These data resources are now more accessible to our healthcare customers across all our platforms. As a result, organizations can see their opportunities to drive performance more clearly, plan more effectively, and respond more quickly to change.”
Building upon its long-standing use of AI and machine learning to normalize, classify, and interpret complex healthcare data, Strata unveiled StrataSignal™, its suite of AI-powered capabilities that help customers work smarter, faster, and with more confidence. StrataSignal brings together predictive, generative, and agentic AI — all powered by the most relevant, near real-time financial, operational, and market data — to enable users to make informed decisions.
The company announced its newest application of AI, Metric Analysis and Summarization, within the StrataJazz Management Reporting module. Metric Analysis and Summarization generates summarizations of metric trends and operational context to make it easier for finance teams to make sense of vast amounts of data, identify the most impactful business areas to focus on, and understand operational challenges. Automating summarization for month-end reporting and analysis will help teams develop concise operational performance summaries for business reviews, reducing the time operational managers spend interpreting results.
Recognizing the 2025 Strata Healthcare LEAP Award Winners
Each year, Strata honors organizations that demonstrate leadership, excellence, and analytics-driven performance improvement by offering the LEAP Award for Healthcare. This year’s winners exemplify measurable impact, including improving margins, optimizing labor, and accelerating reporting through Strata’s platform.
LEAP Award winners use Strata tools to strengthen financial performance, often sharing their lessons learned, strategies, and advice with peers to help them address the same industry-wide challenges. As a result, these organizations impact not only their own community, but also Strata’s far-reaching network of healthcare customers.
“These organizations show what’s possible when you can turn information and insights into impact,” said Cara Boaz, Vice President of Customer Success Management. “Their work benefits not only their communities, but the entire Strata network.”
Customer-Led Collaboration and Peer Insight
A hallmark of the annual LIFT conference experience, this year’s agenda featured dozens of customer-led sessions showcasing peer collaboration and shared learning. Highlights included:
- “Learn from Your Peers: Aligning Your EPM and ERP Strategy” – Health system leaders discussed how integrating enterprise performance management with ERP data improves accuracy and agility.
- “Performance Management at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia” – Hospital leaders described how they modernized budgeting and reporting to enhance transparency and accountability.
- “Successes and Lessons Learned in Augmenting FP&A Teams with Strata Resources” – Panelists shared how Strata’s staff augmentation services helped extend finance capacity and accelerate project delivery at their organization.
These sessions emphasized the value of Strata’s customer community as a network for learning, benchmarking, and collaborative problem-solving.
Addressing the Labor Challenge with Smarter Tools
Another major theme of LIFT25 was workforce optimization. Strata’s Position Control solution — a recent addition to the StrataJazz suite — was featured in sessions such as “Position Control: Process Flow and Best Practices” and “Best Practices in Labor Expense Management.” The solution helps leaders streamline routine hiring decisions, track vacancies, and manage labor costs with real-time visibility.
“With ongoing labor shortages and rising costs, managing workforce decisions with precision is essential,” Martino said. “Our tools allow healthcare organizations to focus their time on strategy rather than process.”
Throughout the virtual user conference, leaders shared how Strata customers are using the company’s data-driven labor tools to strengthen accountability, standardize practices, and improve productivity — critical steps as health systems face continued wage inflation and tight labor markets.
Innovation: From Labor Planning to Predictive Intelligence
Across sessions, the virtual conference highlighted the company’s forward-looking investments in technology and product design. Sessions included:
- “Best Practices in Labor Expense Management” – Exploring the workforce planning tools that work together to offer real-time insights, accurate reporting, and data-driven strategies
- “AI Innovation in FP&A” – Understanding the prevalence of AI capabilities offered across Strata solutions, from summarization to prediction, and what’s to come
- “What the Best Are Doing Differently” – Demonstrating how external benchmarks and payor data can enrich financial modeling and forecasting
Speakers across sessions emphasized that Strata’s innovation is driven by customer impact — not by what is possible, but by what is valuable. As Adams noted, “We’re not pursuing AI for AI’s sake. Every feature we build must help solve a real problem for healthcare leaders.”
Looking Ahead
Across three days of sessions, LIFT25 is highlighting how healthcare organizations are using data integration, AI innovation, and operational insight to redefine healthcare financial performance.
“Every year, LIFT reminds us that progress happens together,” Martino said. “By sharing ideas, refining strategies, and harnessing new technology, we can chart a stronger financial future for healthcare — one that empowers every organization to thrive.”
About Strata Decision Technology
Strata Decision Technology provides enterprise performance management, data, and intelligence solutions that help healthcare organizations achieve better financial and operational outcomes. The company’s StrataJazz®, Axiom®, and Data & Intelligence platforms — trusted by more than 2,300 hospitals and health systems — enable financial planning, benchmarking, and performance improvement at scale.
Learn more at http://www.stratadecision.com.
Media contact:
Stephanie Fergione, Inkhouse
strata@inkhouse.com
