Strategies to Improve Operations

In a recent "healthcare thought leadership" symposium held in Dubai and attended by chiefs, VP's and other senior operational executives, the following strategies emerged as "common themes" that all agreed as being crucial and must do's:

• Leverage enterprise intelligence: Use real-time and retrospective analytics along with prospective modeling. The intelligence can point the way to gains in efficiency and increases in quality.
• Partner with area organizations: Identify the most viable organizations in your area and establish accountable care arrangements with them, such as improved care transitions.
• Evaluate your service lines: Understand how each service line is contributing to care quality and the bottom line. Focus on what you do best.
• Share performance with physicians: Evaluate physician performance and outcomes on an ongoing basis. Share data-driven reports with them.
• Focus your improvement efforts: Initiatives should support at least two of the following: improved outcomes, increased revenue, reduced costs, or better patient and employee satisfaction.
• Share the vision: Develop a visual road-map that can be shared across the organization, and use it to show progress and garner support.
• Ask the people that do the work: Ask front-line staff where improvements can be made to reduce costs and improve processes. Leverage their experience to implement the best suggestions.
• Share successes and best practices with peers: In addition to networking with peers, benchmark against top organizations to point the way to improvements.
• Know whether you’re maximizing your bed capacity: Understand how your diversions, bottlenecks and discharge delays impact patient care and satisfaction, and fix them.
• Enlist change agents: Enlist enthusiastic physician, clinician and staff champions to mobilize their peers around key initiatives.
• Offer adequate training for staff: Often staff fall into workaround processes that can inhibit care quality or efficiency. Mandate refresher training as needed and make sure new hires are adequately trained on systems or processes.
• Optimize workforce usage: Analyze actual needs by shift based on patient population and acuity. Match the need with the number and skills required.