The pressures and challenges of working in today's healthcare are immense. In some instances, layoffs may require those fortunate enough to remain with a hospital to take on more responsibilities, while growing healthcare systems may ask their employees to keep up their increasing level of productivity.
It takes more than a memo, though, to get employees to work smarter and to take on new challenges with an invigorated passion. Brad Fetters, managing director at Huron Healthcare, who previously served as the senior director of performance management and innovation at Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare, says there are three things healthcare executives and supervisors can do to get the most out of their employees — and much of it involves initiative from the executive side.
1. Break down various barriers to optimal performance. New strategies, like bundled payments, are blossoming around healthcare, but many executives are unsure of how to deal with these new challenges to keep their hospitals afloat and thriving. "We see a strategy of optimizing how things are currently performed versus stepping out of the comfort zone and asking, 'Should we even be doing them?'" Mr. Fetters says. "The leaders need to be strong advocates of change so [healthcare] employees can have confidence and say, 'I can take some risks, and my boss has my back.'"
Mr. Fetters says hospital leaders have to loosen the leash on managers and employees because there is no magic recipe for immaculate hospital performance. There will be failed ideas about how to manage care and handle lowered reimbursements — but Mr. Fetters says hospital leaders and employees ultimately learn more about how to achieve optimal performance by learning from those mistakes and addressing staff resistance to change.
2. Create accountability structures. To ensure that each member of a hospital team delivers on their commitments, executives and managers must utilize the wealth of data in today's sophisticated IT systems to chart performance metrics and measurements. Hospital leaders, for example, should follow the day-to-day management of labor and supply costs and then relay that information to the appropriate parties. Electronic health records are becoming archetypical channels to create these types of accountability structures, Mr. Fetters says.
However, he adds that hospitals don't want to flood managers and other employees with the cornucopia of data. Hospitals want to create accountability and transparency — not headaches and nightmares of metric data. "Healthcare is no different that any other industry," Mr. Fetters says. "The worry is overwhelming managers with data. How do they discern what's truly important with the limited time and resources they have?"
3. Standardize processes to eliminate unnecessary and redundant work. Standardizing processes within a hospital is not quite as simple in theory as an assembly line in an automobile manufacturing plant, but the same concepts can be used to weed out redundancies, Mr. Fetters says.
The traditional length of stay is one such process that can be standardized with the ultimate goal of connecting the different work flows in the hospital. Hospital executives may find that their length of stay is far above the national average of 4.8 days or is higher than internally desired. After identifying the issue, hospitals can then chart the entire process, from the time a patient enters a hospital until the time he or she leaves, to see where there is overlap or missed handoffs. Understanding what each department does — operating room for surgery, radiology for imaging, nursing for patient care, revenue cycle for patient accounts, etc. — and getting input from department directors can lead to interwoven departmental functions and the homogenized results.
"How do we work with clients to ensure patients are receiving the appropriate care at the right place with superior outcomes without creating redundancies?" Mr. Fetters says. "It's about striving to create the appropriate standardization and discipline of processes across the organization and with each stakeholder."
It takes more than a memo, though, to get employees to work smarter and to take on new challenges with an invigorated passion. Brad Fetters, managing director at Huron Healthcare, who previously served as the senior director of performance management and innovation at Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare, says there are three things healthcare executives and supervisors can do to get the most out of their employees — and much of it involves initiative from the executive side.
1. Break down various barriers to optimal performance. New strategies, like bundled payments, are blossoming around healthcare, but many executives are unsure of how to deal with these new challenges to keep their hospitals afloat and thriving. "We see a strategy of optimizing how things are currently performed versus stepping out of the comfort zone and asking, 'Should we even be doing them?'" Mr. Fetters says. "The leaders need to be strong advocates of change so [healthcare] employees can have confidence and say, 'I can take some risks, and my boss has my back.'"
Mr. Fetters says hospital leaders have to loosen the leash on managers and employees because there is no magic recipe for immaculate hospital performance. There will be failed ideas about how to manage care and handle lowered reimbursements — but Mr. Fetters says hospital leaders and employees ultimately learn more about how to achieve optimal performance by learning from those mistakes and addressing staff resistance to change.
2. Create accountability structures. To ensure that each member of a hospital team delivers on their commitments, executives and managers must utilize the wealth of data in today's sophisticated IT systems to chart performance metrics and measurements. Hospital leaders, for example, should follow the day-to-day management of labor and supply costs and then relay that information to the appropriate parties. Electronic health records are becoming archetypical channels to create these types of accountability structures, Mr. Fetters says.
However, he adds that hospitals don't want to flood managers and other employees with the cornucopia of data. Hospitals want to create accountability and transparency — not headaches and nightmares of metric data. "Healthcare is no different that any other industry," Mr. Fetters says. "The worry is overwhelming managers with data. How do they discern what's truly important with the limited time and resources they have?"
3. Standardize processes to eliminate unnecessary and redundant work. Standardizing processes within a hospital is not quite as simple in theory as an assembly line in an automobile manufacturing plant, but the same concepts can be used to weed out redundancies, Mr. Fetters says.
The traditional length of stay is one such process that can be standardized with the ultimate goal of connecting the different work flows in the hospital. Hospital executives may find that their length of stay is far above the national average of 4.8 days or is higher than internally desired. After identifying the issue, hospitals can then chart the entire process, from the time a patient enters a hospital until the time he or she leaves, to see where there is overlap or missed handoffs. Understanding what each department does — operating room for surgery, radiology for imaging, nursing for patient care, revenue cycle for patient accounts, etc. — and getting input from department directors can lead to interwoven departmental functions and the homogenized results.
"How do we work with clients to ensure patients are receiving the appropriate care at the right place with superior outcomes without creating redundancies?" Mr. Fetters says. "It's about striving to create the appropriate standardization and discipline of processes across the organization and with each stakeholder."
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