Eliminate These Five Flaws to Improve Asset Utilization in Healthcare

The following is a guest blog post by Mohan Giridharadas, Founder and CEO, LeanTaaS. The passage of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act accelerated the deployment of electronic health records (EHRs) across healthcare. The overwhelming focus was to capture every patient encounter and place it into an integrated system of records. Equipped with this massive database of patient data, health systems believed they could make exponential improvements to patient experiences and outcomes. The pace of this migration resulted in some shortcuts being taken — the consequences of which are now apparent to discerning CFOs and senior leaders. Among these shortcuts was the use of resources and capacity as the basis of scheduling patients; this concept is used by hundreds of schedulers in every health system. While simple to grasp, the definition is mathematically flawed. Not being able to offer a new patient an appointment for at least 10 days negatively impacts the patient experience. Likewise, exceeding capacity by scheduling too many appointments results in long wait times for patients, which also negatively impacts their experience. The troubling paradox is that the very asset creating long wait times and long lead times for appointments also happens to perform at ~50 percent utilization virtually every day. The impact of a mathematically flawed foundation results in alternating between overutilization (causing long patient wait times and/or ...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: Healthcare Healthcare Analytics Healthcare Communication Healthcare Human Resources HealthCare IT Hospitals Healthcare Appointment Scheduling Healthcare Asset Utilization Healthcare Mathmatics LeanTaaS Mohan Giridharadas Source Type: blogs