While pressures to reduce costs and improve quality aren’t new, the imperative has shifted from ‘making progress’ to ‘establishing meaningful and sustainable improvement.’ This is a tall order given the complexities of our industry and the challenges we face.
In our day-to-day interactions with hospital leadership teams, we often hear about performance improvement initiatives that have underperformed, stalled or fallen by the wayside. Yet, we also hear success stories, proving that costs can be managed while improving quality and retaining patient satisfaction.
Recently, I had the pleasure of participating in an HFMA webinar with one of our clients, OSF Healthcare. Dave Stenerson, OSF’s CFO, and I explored the approach OSF has taken to drive sustainable improvement in operational and clinical performance.
Since launching their initiative four years ago, OSF’s results have been significant. During his presentation, Dave highlighted some of the department success stories including achieving labor savings in the NICU, reduction in dietary costs, reduction in utilization of routine x-rays, and using benchmarking to manage FTEs by attrition. These diverse examples reflect the strong commitment by leadership and involvement by everyone to engage in the organization to reduce costs. Bottom line, OSF has reduced annual costs by $160M and they continue to improve efficiency today.
When asked to assess their organization’s benchmarking journey, 30 percent of webinar attendees indicated that their organization’s efforts ‘had a long way to go’ while 20 percent indicated that frontline staff either didn’t know what to do with benchmarking data or that the data itself was inaccurate.
Those results highlight three factors that have been instrumental in OSF’s performance management success:
(1) accurate, transparent and trustworthy benchmarking data. If the data isn’t trusted, associates will spend their time in the world of data denial and organizations will have an uphill battle to make improvements.
(2) actionable and prioritized insights. Having a road map of priorities complete with the ROI can jump start the process and help ensure that hospitals focus on the most significant opportunities.
(3) staff engagement. Your staff is the single best source for ideas as to how to improve and where you can eliminate waste. And engagement at the beginning is key to effective execution and sustainable performance.
I hope you take a few minutes to check out the session materials. Click here for the session presentation and playback.
