How To Improve Operational Efficiency in Hospitals
Better healthcare efficiency can increase patient care effectiveness, patient satisfaction, health outcomes, and costs.
But does the pressure of improving your hospital’s operational efficiency without compromising patient care seem daunting?
The key to improving operational efficiency in hospitals lies heavily in the hospital’s choice of technology. Does your current software streamline how your healthcare services operate?
We’ve compiled six strategies that can help you learn how to improve hospital efficiency — including how to implement technology to better streamline your program’s overall efficiency.
Table of Contents
- How to Improve Hospital Efficiency: 6 Effective Strategies
- #1: Hire a Healthcare MSP
- #2: Improve Cross-Department Coordination
- #3: Invest in Proper Staff Training
- #4: Prioritize Patient Safety
- #5: Create a System for Decision-Making
- #6: Consider a Telehealth Strategy
How To Improve Hospital Efficiency: 6 Effective Strategies
#1: Hire a Healthcare MSP
A Healthcare MSP (Managed Service Provider) works to meet the challenges of healthcare by taking on the burden of workforce management for employers.
Let’s look at exactly how hiring a healthcare MSP can help improve your hospital’s efficiency.
Alleviates Administrative Burden
Many hospitals are now using contingency staffing to help fill workforce needs. But sourcing, recruiting, and onboarding temporary staff in addition to your full-time staff increase the internal time and expense burdens of your program.
Healthcare MSPs are becoming a necessity for hospitals and other healthcare organizations for this reason — helping to alleviate administrative burdens in many day-to-day tasks by streamlining operations.
A quality healthcare MSP, such as Trusted Managed Services, also helps to ease internal burdens such as:
- Billing and payroll
- Credentialing
- Job orders
- Contracting
- Compliance
- Risk and insurance management
- And more
Automates Processes
A healthcare MSP can help improve hospital efficiency by automating time-sensitive tasks.
Your organization’s administrative team can save valuable time by automating:
- Billing
- Contract management
- Assignment extensions
- Timesheet approvals
This allows your internal staff to focus their efforts on other things and not feel overloaded by day-to-day responsibilities. And not only do healthcare MSPs help save time, but they can also lead to measurable cost savings.
Simplifies Recruiting
Your HR departments can only benefit from a streamlined hiring process that a healthcare MSP can provide. With a nationwide pool of workers, a reliable healthcare MSP, paired with a VMS (Vendor Management System) can help ensure you always have the staff you need.
Paired together, a quality, vendor-neutral MSP and VMS can help fill staffing needs at your facility with a contingent workforce. A VMS provides facilities with a large pool of highly qualified contingent staff — while an MSP helps get staff into your door faster by automating the onboarding process and decreasing time-to-fill rates. This automated process takes significant stress off of your recruiting team, which can now focus time and efforts elsewhere.
And with a quality MSP like Trusted Managed Services, you’ll have professionals who understand the software functions of a VMS to gain access to staffing partners throughout the industry, helping you reduce vacancy rates and improve the quality of your facility’s contingent workforce.
Our MSP offers a customizable and comprehensive solution to your facility’s staffing challenges — helping you manage everything from interviewing and hiring to onboarding and contract extensions.
Utilizes Business Intelligence
The healthcare industry is experiencing significant benefits using data analytics such as reducing treatment costs and improving patients’ quality of life.
It helps healthcare providers make informed decisions about improvement or implementation of services and opportunities for growth — helping you continuously improve and plan for the future.
A healthcare MSP can improve your hospital’s efficiency by providing you with data analytics and updates on key performance trends such as:
- Gaining business intelligence from an MSP can help with staffing optimization. The MSP can collect data to optimize staffing levels, redistribute the workload, and reduce burnout rates and hiring costs.
- An MSP can also use business intelligence to improve revenue flow by processing financial data to optimize revenue cycles such as billing and insurance workflows.
- Individual health trends analytics is another example of using business intelligence. By analyzing each patient’s data, an MSP can identify trends and patterns, improving patient care outcomes and reducing costs.
- Fraud detection is another way a healthcare MSP can utilize business intelligence by processing data from various sources to detect and prevent insurance fraud. It can also help detect any waste of resources and healthcare system abuse.
A knowledgeable healthcare MSP can give guidance throughout the business intelligence process. They can help your team understand the intricacies of various processes such as the design, implementation, and adoption processes. Once the implementation is complete, MSPs like Trusted Managed Services will continue to provide your facility with much-needed support.
Ensures Regulatory Compliance
Between new regulations and changes to existing regulations, many hospitals are struggling just to keep up with the scope and depth of compliance. It has become almost a daily effort to ensure that all processes and strategies meet the latest regulatory requirements.
A healthcare MSP can help with hospital efficiency by ensuring your technology, processes, and security measures are up-to-date and in line with regulatory requirements, such as HIPAA.
Your hospital will also be better prepared for any potential audits — which means avoiding any fines, penalties, or operational downtime.
Increases Employee Retention and Reduces Burnout
A reliable healthcare MSP easily manages your temporary workers, but a healthcare MSP can also help you give your full-time staff the time and support they need to do their jobs at the top of their capabilities.
Utilizing a healthcare MSP to hire temporary workers can help prevent employee burnout by decreasing staff to patient ratio and giving permanent staff more time/holidays off. These temporary workers likely have a contract clause that requires them to work one holiday. They can fill these shifts so permanent staff can have the day off.
This can help improve workforce efficiency across the board. It can also help promote retention and engagement of your full-time staff — reducing the risk of turnover and staff burnout.
Fully Customizable to Your Facility’s Operations
When choosing a healthcare MSP, consider how easy it is to customize for the unique needs of your hospital.
At Trusted Managed Services, we provide an MSP that is fully customizable for what you’re looking for.
For example, if you’re already familiar with MSPs and looking for a solution that offers a more hands-off approach, helping you to get things running, we can do that. Your dedicated compliance specialist will always be available to you when the need arises.
On the other hand, if you’re looking for a healthcare MSP that doesn’t bounce you around to different people, that can hold your hand all along the way, and that can customize as much as necessary, we do that too.
Trusted Managed Services conducts onsite visits and drills down operational efficiency to a single point of contact to offer you fully customizable solutions.
#2: Improve Cross-Department Coordination
Within the same hospital, patients may rely on the coordination of various departments and multiple providers.
For example, if a patient visits the emergency room, it might involve services from:
- Radiology
- Internal medicine
- The pharmacy; and
- The lab
Having a streamlined solution to ensure these different departments are on the same page and collaborating can help facilitate more efficient information sharing and reduce the risk of errors.
Coordination between departments can also support a positive, collaborative workplace culture. It can minimize the risk of data silos, redundancy, or miscommunications.
#3: Invest in Proper Staff Training
When staff are well-trained, they can work more efficiently. They should have less need to find answers to questions, fix errors, or have to quickly learn new concepts.
Invest in your hospital team and provide appropriate training by staying in the know of:
- Policy changes
- New technologies; and
- Industry trends
#4: Prioritize Patient Safety
Putting hospital patient safety first should always be a priority, but it can also increase hospital efficiency. Dealing with errors and delays is not only costly, but it takes valuable time away from day-to-day hospital tasks.
Something like a misdiagnosis or prescription error causes additional work to address medical complications or legal issues — not to mention possible reputational damage. Hospital efficiency can be greatly impacted, your operations can be slowed down, and profit can be reduced when patient safety isn’t prioritized.
#5: Create a System for Decision-Making
For your hospital to run efficiently, you must have a system in place that helps you decide on the right options for improving your healthcare services.
Healthcare needs and solutions are constantly evolving. It’s beneficial to let everyone in your organization be included in decisions that can directly impact the organization’s efficiency.
For example, having monthly meetings that involve leaders of each department can provide valuable insights into how to best improve your healthcare services and determine what you may need to add or discard.
#6: Consider a Telehealth Strategy
Before the pandemic and shutdowns, the healthcare industry did not leverage much of the technology-driven resources that can allow patients to remain home and even providers to work from home.
Telehealth has offered a solution to not only increase access to high-quality healthcare for patients but also offers a solution for healthcare efficiency, particularly for primary care providers.
Offering telehealth options can open up new revenue streams and expand your reach within a community. Telehealth is especially valuable in rural settings or areas facing provider shortages. Telehealth is also a valuable tool for improving patient relationships and managing chronic conditions.
