Love The Ones You're With

Exploit efficiency

The diagnostic and treatment departments are a tremendous opportunity to exploit efficiency and a great patient experience. The outpatient encounters in imaging, cardiology, and GI are exponentially greater than the number of inpatient admissions. These services should be lucrative and provide several touch points for patients and families. Yet, the actual encounters often create bad impressions and therefore undesirable word-of-mouth. For many organizations, these conditions have not been objectively evaluated in quite a while. Perhaps it's a good time to talk a look at the services with a new perspective and ask:

1) Are we asking patients what they would like from us? In other words, do our scheduling and staffing patterns reflect the times most requested by patients?

2) Do we know how referring physicians feel about our service right now?

3) Are there cost-neutral things our competitors are doing to improve service or satisfaction that we should consider?

4) Do we have excess capacity in staff, technology, or space that could improve our financial performance?

Evaluate your IT

Most hospitals have IT capabilities they are not using. In many instances, they buy things in one system or application they already have in another. Complexity explains this phenomenon but doesn't compensate for the waste. Perhaps it's a good time to be certain you understand current information system capabilities, particularly in your clinical systems. The recession will not diminish the focus on safety and quality, and technology remains vital. Make sure you are demanding all that you can from investments already made, including the match between the information systems and the people responsible for them. There can be very pleasant surprises in systems optimization, although vendors may not agree.

Capital spending

Facility projects will be the largest hit to most organizations. Many projects that were well-justified and/or deeply desirable will not be constructed or are being revisited in terms of scope and timing. This is another potential blessing in disguise. Space is the least understood asset in most hospitals, which is peculiar because of its associated costs. Nevertheless, very few people have any notion of the real productivity or functionality of the space. As you look to make employees, physicians, patients, and families happy despite the new building being on hold, why not obtain an objective functional assessment of your patient care space and figure out which ones truly need attention versus areas where expenditure is unlikely to have a positive impact on your business?

Doing so allows you to prioritize short-term improvements and gives you insight for the longer term. In addition, such information can be very interesting for board members, employees, and physicians. Board members tend only to hear about facilities when someone is asking for big dollars to add more. They might be intrigued to hear that a capacity analysis reveals opportunities for better throughput and efficiency. Employees and physicians in conflict with their work space typically believe the answer is to get more. Often, convincing them to make better use of what they have comes from sharing information about allocation, functionality, and design using objective data. Looking at space across the organization is likely to reveal which services most need investment. Evaluating need and potential impact against financial capability streamlines decisions for the short- and long-term regardless of how much money is available.

As Horace said, "Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous times would have lain dormant."