EON Blog

Patient safety and quality are the most critically important elements of patient care. Safety and quality cannot just be given lip service, but must be measured and monitored to ensure that they improving or at least not declining. Many health institutions have regular monitoring of KPIs (key performance indicators) for patient safety and performance quality.

In fact, Medicare and Medicaid require that certain measures, such as specific mortality and readmission rates, are reported regularly and often made public. This is a bit like restaurant public health inspection ratings that can draw people in if they’re high or make them shy away—as from the plague—if they’re low.

Without referring providers, many healthcare facilities would find themselves with numerous empty beds and idle medical experts, rapidly on the way to financial decline. Fortunately, referring providers do exist, and the cooperation between primary care providers and hospital facilities can provide the best possible healthcare for patients with serious or chronic medical conditions.

In healthcare, as in any organization, one of the major keys to success is the ability to retain qualified staff. Not only do engaged and capable employees deliver more discretionary effort to the business, but they also present a positive image of the organization to patients and their families and friends.  

In the very competitive healthcare field, keeping trained staff members is crucial to avoiding employee overwork and burnout as well as the high costs of sourcing, hiring, and onboarding new employees. At year-end 2016, average hospital turnover rate was 16.2% as reported in the annual NSI Nursing Solutions, Inc. survey. Financial impact to the organization adds up quickly when “the average cost of turnover for a bedside RN ranges from $38,900 to $59,700 resulting in the average hospital losing $5.13M to $7.86M, annually.”

What is the pacemaker in a healthcare facility? Not a medical pacemaker device, but instead the process step that determines the rate of patient throughput. For most surgical hospitals, it is the operating room (OR). The number of patients in admissions, pre-op, post-op, waiting rooms, hospital beds, and on the road back home ties largely to the flow rate or patient cycle time through the operating room.

To some extent, the throughput of your healthcare facility can be measured based on “bodies on beds.” As in hotel operations, if you’re seeing low occupancy of your beds, you may not be pulling in the required revenue to cover your fixed operating costs.

Given that consideration, one of the key efforts that you may need to pursue to improve operational performance is to get a new patient into a bed or room as quickly as possible after the prior patient is able to be discharged. This process is known as patient room turnover.

If you’ve ever been a patient in a healthcare facility, you’ve experienced the patient discharge process. When you know—even without a medical degree—that you’re on the road to recovery, you probably also have the thought: I just want to go home!

Before patients can be released, however, many things must happen as part of the managed discharge process. These include actions related to health assessment, forward-looking care, in-house administration, and billing.

When patients are sick, in pain, undergoing procedures, or simply getting routine checkups, they expect their healthcare organizations to deliver quality outcomes using efficient processes. Unfortunately, hospitals and medical facilities, even those with high-quality performance, often have reputations for poor efficiency and notoriously long wait times.