Providing efficient and proactive patient care
Improving population health
Giving patients the best possible healthcare should remain the number one priority of any hospital. Give equal focus on prevention and treatment plans. As a hospital, your job isn’t just taking care of patients, it goes well beyond that. Encouraging patients to manage their own health by providing them resources will help you adopt a better approach toward patient care. Educating and enlightening patients about managing their own health will lower healthcare costs and result in improved population health.
Connecting with patients
Being more patient-oriented and meeting and exceeding patient expectations is something all hospitals must strive for. Streamlining processes such as emergency care services is one way of doing it, as demonstrated by the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Jersey. It guarantees that every emergency room patient is evaluated within 15 minutes and undergoes a medical exam within 30 minutes, and if it doesn’t happen, the patient’s fee is waived. It just goes to show the hospital is ready to go the extra mile to connect with patients.
Is your outpatient department adequately staffed? Patients shouldn’t have to wait incessantly to schedule appointments or endure tedious wait times to meet physicians. How do you deal with these shortcomings? Add extra support staff that will promptly answer customer queries, and consider extending the hours of operations. Incorporating these small measures ensures your patients are a satisfied lot which eventually translates into profitability.
Handling big data and equipment
Using advanced equipment
Emerging medical technologies give way to better patient care. Investing in advanced medical equipment like MelaFind, innovative DNA sequencing machines and other improved diagnostic equipment shows that the hospital is genuinely interested in delivering top-notch patient care. The use of the latest medical equipment shortens the duration of hospital stays and results in improved quality of life. It may help chronically ill or disabled patients by giving them a new lease on life.
Upgrading computer systems to handle more data
Every patient that walks into the hospital generates a medical record that translates into a significant amount of data. Upgrading your computer systems to handle all this data is important from the clinical and financial point of view. Hospitals garner a few terabytes of data on a daily basis. Upgrade your system so it can efficiently store massive amount of information. Collecting and analyzing this data is an important step in producing key patient metrics which will help hospitals achieve their health management goals.
Managing human resources
Assessing employee skills
Does assessing employee skills help? Employee skill assessment is a powerful tool because it determines your employees’ current skill sets, their strengths and weaknesses and areas where they need additional training. It helps you devise training programs to refine your employees’ skill sets. It keeps the employee motivated and happy, and satisfied employees improve customer service, which can only be profitable from a business standpoint. When you provide training to employees that boost their creativity and morale, they’ll respect you as an organization and are less likely to quit, thereby reducing turnover, and reducing the need to spend on hiring, training and development of new employees.
Physician recruitment
Building a strong and healthy relationship with physicians is a must to increase hospital market share. Hospitals provide physicians stable employment, so if your facility employs physicians focus your marketing efforts around this benefit of greater stability. Devise new strategies that will lure physicians to your facility, such as simplifying the ordering process and providing them with educational material. It does require time and money, but the effort will be worth it if you can connect with physicians who will help your hospital flourish.
Transitioning to ICD-10
Hospitals can literally stay ahead by training their staff in new medical practices. According to Healthcare Informatics, another challenge most hospitals face is the transition to ICD-10, the new set of codes that’ll be out October 2014. The switch from ICD-9 to ICD-10 is going to revolutionize healthcare and affect everyone from medical coders and billers to doctors, administrative staff, vendors, and insurance companies. Hospitals need to focus on how to implement education programs for their staff so they’re proficient in ICD-10 when it eventually rolls out. For instance, CareerStep offers online ICD-10 training as part of its healthcare courses which is designed to help students acquire thorough knowledge of the ICD-10 CM ICD-10 PCS codes. Investing in staff training will yield good return on investment because a trained staff is unlikely to leave, thus reducing the attrition rate.
Hospitals, like any other large organization, must continuously develop their business strategies that follow and are a step above and beyond the current market trends. Being proactive and innovative and keeping the customer (patients and physicians both in the case of hospitals) is the key to remaining competitive and staying way ahead of market trends.
Emily Bates most recently served as a training and development manager for a healthcare information management company based in Tulsa City, Okla. She specializes in identifying training needs of employees and designing training programs to help upgrade their skills with an objective to improve the company’s efficiency.
