If Our Healthcare System Did This, Think of the Time We’d Save

In this series, professionals share their secrets to being more productive. Read the posts here, then write your own (use #ProductivityHacks in the body).

I'm a time study man, and a time study man can't waste time.
For a time study man to waste time is a crime…

 I’ve always loved that song, “Think of the Time I Save,” from the Broadway musical The Pajama Game. Because I am that guy! I might not go so far as to dig my own grave before I die, as he recommends… though it’s not a bad idea. The truth is I think constantly and obsessively about asset utilization and waste — in my personal life, in my company, and with the nearly 70,000 medical providers who use our cloud-based network every day.

I hate catered meetings at my company because it pains me to think about the uneaten sandwiches — and the time and energy that went into preparing and delivering them. (My own lunches are more often than not leftovers recombined hastily into Frankenstein-like concoctions of caloric efficiency). I commute on my bicycle not to save the planet, but because I can merge exercise with transit. Recently I was delighted to find a bike trail so I can dial into conference calls en route without killing myself.

I run my company mostly through my calendar, blocking time for the work that requires my, and the company’s, complete focus — the undiscovered or untilled terrain of opportunity. Forcing those blocks of protected time to appear creates a wonderful sucking sound as all the other work that doesn’t merit the same level of focus drained away. 

Productivity hacks are fundamental to my life, and to my company’s business. Like so many emerging economy companies, we are in the business of sourcing and mining deep pockets of idle capacity. In 2014, for example, 37% of hospital beds went unoccupied due to excess capacity. And we know from our network data that 30% of physician appointments are never filled. Beyond idle capacity, physicians burn tragic amounts of their time managing administrivia and clicking around in poorly designed electronic health records — time that should be spent caring for patients. 

A huge pain point for physician practices that we’ve been hacking into recently is the dreaded electronic health record system implementation. At its worst, it’s a traumatizing, disruptive process that can take months and torpedo physician productivity. Over the past year we’ve managed to slash our average small practice implementation time from 12 weeks down to six. By the low bar of health IT industry standards that’s pretty impressive, but compared to “going live” on Mint or TurboTax… not so much. So we just invented and started rolling out a five-day implementation. To get there we had to deconstruct the process and reconstruct it with a new, ruthless standard of efficiency. It turned out we had built business processes around the exceptions rather than building to the norm and treating exceptions as exceptions. Now that we’ve worked that out, the next lily pad is an instant-on, self-service implementation. 

The beauty of hacking implementation time is that it yields productivity benefits on all sides. Physicians can go live on an electronic health record or switch systems without compromising care or seeing a dip in patient visits and revenue. And back at athenahealth we can get more clients live faster with the same resource commitment — so we can focus on helping clients perform better vs. simply learning the system. 

Health care is a gold mine of idle capacity just waiting to be mined. We just need more men and women to grab a shovel and start digging. Just think of the time, and money, we can save.