Redundancy, duplication, and waste.
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared on ECG's website.
They are pervasive in today’s healthcare delivery system, driving up operating and capital costs. And in an era of increasing consolidation, healthcare organizations that expand through mergers and acquisitions are increasingly challenged to operate as a unified system—and often face painful decisions about redundant service offerings.
To achieve economic sustainability and market essentiality, we believe health systems must integrate and rationalize to enhance clinical care, optimize operations, and lower costs, ultimately focusing on the improvement of every aspect of patient care operations.
For hospitals and health systems, integration might mean implementing common operational processes and workflows, adopting evidence-based protocols and clinical pathways, and approaching decision-making with a system mindset. Rationalization is more likely to centralize corporate functions or alter the scope, mix, and/or distribution of clinical services.
Pursuing integration and/or rationalization is difficult, as both call for examining and typically changing what is being done where and by whom. Healthcare leaders encounter internal hurdles—culture, leadership commitment, and resources—and external obstacles, in the form of community resistance, local political pressure, and state-specific regulations. Little wonder that many organizations have been slow to start down this path. Click here to continue>>
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