Today’s healthcare environment consists of swirling currents of insurance demands, overhead worries, constantly-changing practice situations and regulations to keep track of.
Keeping your head above water in a healthcare profession is no easy task.
To remain efficient and competitive, it is important to consistently and constantly strive for process improvements whenever possible. “Kaizen” or Continuous process improvement, is a core value at HybridChart and something we certainly live and breathe on a daily basis. We wanted to share some of our tips to help aid you in your healthcare process improvement efforts.
4 Process Improvement Tips for Healthcare Efficiency
Huddle Up.
Holding regular meetings or huddles is critical to keeping your team well-informed and continuously focused on providing quality patient care and improving efficiency. It also will provide an opportunity for everyone to discuss information from different perspectives, offer suggestions and to air any concerns. This in turn builds a stronger team, encourages better service and ultimately creates more satisfied patients.
Measure & Manage.
Management expert, Peter Drucker, poignantly said, “If you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it.” Before you start moving forward on any process improvement in your practice, you must first decide which areas are in most need of improvement and then establish your goals and the outcomes desired. Based on your findings, set measurable goals for the areas in most need of improvement. Take a look at these six aims for improvement to guide your improvement goal-setting from The Institute of Medicine.
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Develop a Master Plan.
Do you have a master plan that addresses both short and long term goals? Establishing and implementing one will help your bottom line and bring that much-needed order to your hospital. Having a strong and strategic plan in place with goals clearly outlined will ensure that those goals are met and that you meet the expectations of your patients and practice.
Communicate Goals.
Once a plan is set in place, you must communicate it with your team. It sounds simple, but it is a step that is so often overlooked. Once the goals are established team-wide, you can share any milestones met along with setbacks experienced. When your team is all on the same page, it will help to boost engagement which will in turn help outcomes internally and for your patients.
We encourage you to utilize these process improvement tips to improve your overall practice efficiency and enhance your team satisfaction and the patient experience.
HybridChart—Creating a Culture of Continuous Process Improvement
HybridChart is driven by the hard-core belief that every process can be improved and that every user has the power to improve each process. That spirit guides us daily in developing the most agile charge capture tool available today. This tool, integrated with a practice’s EHR, puts census management, discharge planning, quality metrics and secure messaging – all in the palm of the hand of the provider at the point of care. Learn more here!
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- More About Dr. Sanders
Dr. Gregory Sanders is a Harvard-trained, practicing cardiologist and founder and CEO of HybridChart. He has been coding since the 1980s and has spent his medical career focusing on improving processes. His patient care skills earned him recognition as one of Phoenix Magazine’s TOP DOCs. He lives in Scottsdale with his family.