Increasing productivity in hospitals is an important goal. Administrative hassles cut into the time physicians can spend treating patients and increase healthcare operating costs.
Hospital management is able to improve efficiency through the reallocation of capital and labor resources. This can be achieved by following these five tried-and-true strategies.
1. Focus on Processes
When it comes to productivity, the first step is simply getting started. You can read all about workflows, Kanban boards and other new tools – but none of that will matter unless you actually increases the overall efficiency and productivity. Creating a process that fits your work style and needs is essential for long-term success. Whether that means scheduling time to chat with co-workers or taking steps to avoid distractions, there are many ways to get the ball rolling.
The goal of managing productivity is to improve the ratio of outputs to inputs. That’s why it’s important to focus on processes that are measurable and can be consistently calculated. Subjective or qualitative assessment does not translate well into productivity ratios and can skew results.
Hospitals must continually look for ways to cut costs and improve efficiency and productivity. Otherwise, they will risk falling behind and hurting their bottom line. For example, a hospital that continues to spend more money on resources like nurses or physicians than they do on patient care will have a hard time justifying its costs to insurance companies.
One way to improve productivity is by focusing on the process of healthcare delivery. Traditionally, productivity methods have focused on hard metrics such as time and financials. Clinics may limit their hours and hire only essential staff to maximize productivity. Doctors often prioritize brevity in appointments to see more patients per day. This approach ignores the needs of patients and their satisfaction with their care.
The best way to measure productivity is to set clear goals and keep track of them. This allows you to identify potential problems before they arise and address them before they become major issues. It also makes it easier for employees to understand the value of their work and feel empowered to make changes that will help them achieve their objectives.
2. Make the Right Decisions
Hospital operational efficiency measures how well a hospital manages its resources to deliver high-quality healthcare services. Improving this type of efficiency helps a clinic reduce medical costs and improve patient outcomes.
Productivity is a key metric in business, and boosting it requires more than telling staff to work harder or tweaking the workplace to meet daily goals. It takes analyzing processes, investing in efficiency-enhancing technologies, optimizing layouts, and establishing a performance culture that promotes a healthy work/life balance.
As a result, it’s no surprise that the average adult makes about 35,000 decisions per day (Psychology Today). But it doesn’t have to be so complicated. In fact, making great decisions is all about balancing short-term and long-term value.
For example, if an employee is feeling overwhelmed or burnt out, it’s important to consider how much time and effort it will take to get back to their normal productivity level. If the answer is that it’s too much to recover in a reasonable amount of time, it might be necessary to let that project go or find another one.
The same goes for a healthcare facility or practice. Although it’s essential to make sure that all patients receive the best possible care, it’s equally important to focus on productivity and profitability.
During the pandemic, it was crucial for clinics to maximize their economic outputs. In the surgical sector, three out of eight clinics displayed satisfactory to optimal productivity levels during both years. The results show that it’s possible to maintain a high-level of productivity by fully exploiting the available human and capital resources while improving the quality of the clinical practices.
3. Have a Plan of Action
A key to increasing productivity is having a clear plan of action. This allows everyone involved to see what needs to be done, how it will be accomplished and when it should be completed. It also helps to identify any obstacles that may arise along the way and address them proactively rather than reactively.
In healthcare, there are many things that can affect productivity, from staffing issues to inefficient processes. But one of the biggest factors is often a lack of time. Doctors and nurses have to balance patient needs, administrative tasks and their personal lives, making it difficult to maintain a high level of productivity.
Traditional methods of boosting healthcare productivity focus on quantitative rather than qualitative measures, such as cutting clinic open hours or hiring only essential employees. However, these strategies only answer half of the question; they don’t address the other crucial factor – patients’ satisfaction with their care. In order to maximize productivity, hospitals must be able to meet the demands of the patients they serve while also providing high-quality service and minimizing costs.
To accomplish this, hospitals must focus on improving their operations. This means finding ways to increase the ratio of outputs to inputs, enhance service levels and improve outcomes and other performance metrics. This can be challenging, but the benefits of doing so are considerable.
Having a clear plan of action is essential for achieving goals in any industry, including healthcare. An effective plan of action is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. Additionally, it is important to communicate with team members about the status of their assignments, ensuring they are on track and identifying any barriers that need to be addressed quickly. A tool like Motion, an AI task manager, can help make it easy to create and manage a plan of action while also providing visibility into task completion and progress updates.
4. Be Consistent
Consistency is a key factor in building a happy, energetic high performing team. When a manager and leader are consistent in their decisions, behaviours and actions, they set out a clear framework that team members can easily understand and work within. I’ve seen inconsistent leaders lead chaotic and hesitant teams, which lack focus and commitment. On the other hand, I’ve also seen consistent managers and leaders build cohesive and motivated teams that thrive.
In the healthcare industry, productivity means optimizing your hospital’s economic outputs to ensure a balanced workload for physicians, stable staffing, and healthy margins for your health system. However, the traditional methods of measuring productivity – such as time and financial metrics – only capture part of the picture.
One of the most important factors to consider in evaluating your hospital’s profitability is patient satisfaction. Patients’ satisfaction with your services will determine how long they’ll wait to see a provider and whether or not they’ll return to your clinic for future care.
To increase patient satisfaction, you can focus on administrative efficiency – such as improving patient check-in procedures to make it quicker for patients to be seen – and shortening wait times without sacrificing patient outcomes.
You can also measure patient satisfaction by asking for unprompted feedback, which is an easy way to assess your clinic’s performance and identify potential improvements. By monitoring patient satisfaction, you can improve the overall quality of your hospital’s services and improve the experience for both your current and future patients.
5. Invest in Technology
Healthcare is a crucial pillar of the economy, but healthcare productivity lags far behind other industries. The reasons for this are numerous, from market irregularities to U.S. healthcare infrastructure peculiarities to regulatory requirements, but one thing that health systems can control is how they manage their workforces. They can do this by identifying workflow bottlenecks, adopting tools that help to alleviate those obstacles, and creating work environments that promote staff satisfaction.
It is important to note that this is not about cracking the whip or putting more pressure on staff, but rather finding ways to empower teams to work at their peak performance. Investing in technology to help with that is an excellent start, but it is also important to ensure that the digital solutions are designed with the user experience and broader business goals in mind.
For example, appointment scheduling and advanced analytics are great investments for increasing productivity, but it is imperative that the data is accurate and trustworthy. If it is not, then the technology will be prone to errors and will not serve its purpose.
Investing in the right technology to help with productivity is vital, but it is also important for health systems to invest in their employees. By empowering them with the right digital tools and providing learning opportunities, they can help their teams achieve peak performance levels in their everyday job functions. This will not only help to maximize productivity in clinics and hospitals but will also create a more sustainable environment for all involved. It’s an investment that is well worth making. To learn more about how to improve productivity at your health system, download Altera’s free workbook, “Pursuing Productivity in Clinics and Hospitals”.
