Seven Essential Positioning Steps
In the nearly three decades that Brady & Associates has been privileged to work with America's hospitals, there has never been more uncertainty about reimbursement trends and the general economy's trajectory.
Here are seven powerful action steps you can take to best position your hospital in these uncertain times.
- Develop a culture of accountability. This is more important than processes. It is more important than technology. Institutional culture shapes everything.
- Make certain that every department manager has mastered the basic management skill set. Every member of your management should understand how to plan, organize, direct and control resources in pursuit of defined objectives.
- Assure that the hospital's management data set is complete and up to date. The management data set defines the metrics used to measure department performance (patient days, meals served, billed tests, square feet serviced, etc.). Many hospitals are still using faulty or incomplete management data sets. You cannot afford to do so.
- Establish activity-based staffing standards for each department. Staffing standards must be based on current workload levels. If department utilization has increased or decreased by a significant fraction since standards were first developed, they must be recalibrated. Otherwise, staffing projections will be incorrect.
- Provide all department managers with routine resource management performance feedback on at least a monthly basis. The process should automatically require variance explanations and those explanations should be systematically reviewed and evaluated.
- Monitor the hospital's performance against a defined set of financial management benchmarks, appropriate to your hospital's size, setting and case mix. Consider such indicators as current ratio, days cash on hand, days in accounts receivable, inventory turnover, operating margin, personnel expense/operating revenue, quick ratio, return on assets and return on equity.
- Thoroughly evaluate the hospital's systems and work processes, resources, organization, and institutional culture to identify, prioritize, and resolve barriers to optimum attainable performance.
If you are not yet where you would like to be in any of these areas, we can help. For more information, call (816) 587-2120 or send e-mail to info@bradyinc.com. Please include your contact information in the body of your query.