4 ways to improve productivity in healthcare

Photo credit: Getty/Jochen Sands

The industry-wide movement from volume- to value-based care and alternative payment models will require organizations to find new ways to increase productivity.

“Increasing productivity is a survival skill in healthcare today,” writes healthcare futurist Joe Flower in a post for Hospitals & Health Networks. “We will not find the huge increases in productivity that we need by doing what we do now and just doing it incrementally more efficiently. We have to find productivity in a changed payment system that allows us to drop wasteful practices and streamline the workflows that are left.”

Although it may not be easy to do more with less, it is possible to find ways to be more productive, he says. Here are just a few of his suggestions:

If you change your payment structure, make sure your productivity metric matches it. This will make it easier to spot productivity issues, he says. Flower uses the example of an organization that moves a pain clinic from a fee-for-service model to a per-employee-per-month contract for a warehousing company. If the organization performs an MRI on every patient, it will lower productivity and raise costs, he says.

Redesign your EHRs to reflect clinical workflow. Most systems aren’t built around clinician workflow or patient needs, he says. The poor structure and poor interface creates productivity issues.

Make sure emerging technologies actually help productivity. New technology, such as artificial intelligence and robotics, can actually impede productivity if it forces clinicians to adapt to the technology instead of making sure the technology meets the needs of clinical workflow. But if used in the appropriate way, it can reduce mistakes and administrative tasks. Flower says good examples of technologies that have boosted productivity are IBM Watson and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center’s Oncology Expert Advisor.

Lobby against increased regulations. It’s difficult for any organization to fully comply with all of the regulations currently in place. Flower advocates for providers to lobby and organize to persuade federal and state agencies and other regulators to take information from a standardized data set derived directly from each organization’s electronic records.