With the rapid curtailment of nonessential and non-acute services, and the redeployment of resources to meet anticipated COVID-19 peak demands, executives and managers are pressed even more heavily to meet the basics of quality, service, and the bottom line.
Workforce productivity reporting can be the eyes and ears on the hospital floor that translates how care is provided efficiently and effectively. In this time of crisis response, organizations need to rethink how productivity data is interpreted.
Financial performance, while still a vital focus, becomes a secondary concern to optimizing a limited workforce. Traditional workforce performance improvement initiatives should not be “put on hold” during this health crisis; they must be reengineered to fit the current paradigm. Reporting against historical standards has the potential to provide the executive team with unusable information.
Additional time required to follow precaution guidelines causes productivity standards to be adjusted. For example, a CT department would expect an exam, including room turnaround, to take twenty to thirty minutes. With new requirements to perform terminal cleaning and appropriate air exchange, this time could easily triple.
“When we started, until we got HEPA filtration, we had to let the room sit for 1 hour, but even in suites where we had that in place, we still had a 30-minute terminal clean to add into the process for each COVID RO patient. Now our own technologists are doing the cleans and they take about 15 minutes, and with HEPA filtration the room has to sit for only 30 minutes, so at best case we are adding 45 minutes per case delay into the suite.”
- Danielle Henricksen, MBA, BSRT(R)(CRA), IR/Research Manager/Interim Radiology Director at Bryan Medical Center
With patients waiting for exams, the “delay impact” multiplies, lengthening wait times and increasing lengths of stay in the emergency department and inpatient units. Adjusting radiology staff due to decreased elective volumes could leave the department understaffed to meet the needs of the inpatient population.
In addition to effectively managing staff in areas with surges in COVID-19 volume, workforce principles such as staffing to demand can be used to efficiently redeploy or furlough resources that are underutilized due to the curtailment of nonessential services. However, the uncertainty of the demand for acute care services requires an organization to build additional flexibility to reengage staff as patient demand changes.
“One of the many challenges we found ourselves in overnight was responding to the changing events and how those events would also affect our associates’ lives. We realized quickly that while it may not appear appropriate to think about productivity at a time like this, we recognized that it is our job to make sure we are managing our resources effectively, even during this crisis.”
- CFO at Large Rural Hospital in Central Arkansas
Organizations planning how to respond to current and future demands on their workforce resources will benefit greatly from productivity standards and models that accurately account for the greater workload this pandemic has created.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, position, or policy of Berkeley Research Group, LLC or its other employees and affiliates.