Healthcare Administrators: Lighten Your Load With These 4 Tips

Between managing your staff, handling budgets, and offsetting expenses from uncovered Medicare treatments, you probably feel like you have the most stressful job in the world. It doesn’t have to be that way. Healthcare Administrators can lighten their load and better serve patients with these 4 tips:

1. Hire someone to program a custom Excel financial tracker

You may be required to track expenses on paper or in your boss’ chosen software program at the end of the day, but you need a separate method to accurately calculate income, expenses, and project the future. Excel is the best tool for the job, but don’t download a template. Templates are more trouble than they’re worth. You need a professionally programmed spreadsheet that only requires entering a few numbers.

Here’s why template expense trackers in Excel don’t work:

• They’re functional, but not aesthetically formatted, creating subconscious agitation during use.
• They aren’t programmed to reference other sheets, forcing you to create a new file every month.
• They’ve been carelessly created.
• They don’t project daily expenses or income for the whole month.
• They don’t consider your bank balance to show you the bigger picture.
• You have to customize them and they’re never a perfect fit.

Here’s what a custom programed expense tracker does:

Great aesthetics to help you focus

A good expense tracker will have as much aesthetic appeal as it does functionality. The font will be readable, scalable, and printable. The row height and length of columns will be appropriate to the content and provide proper padding. The colors will serve to help you identify sections without being an eyesore or nearly invisible.

Automatic calculation based on what’s important to you

Some excel templates are programmed to automatically calculate the basics – like subtracting expenses from income – but that’s not enough. To free up your time and prevent human error, you need a deeper view of your finances. For example, you’ll want to automate the calculation of your expected available cash for each day of the month and for expected expenses that are going out each day. This should be calculated based on the exact date expenses are expected to clear, as well as when income is expected to become available.

You’ll save hours of manual calculations this way.

2. Do daily yoga to be stress-free and effective

You have a heavy workload, and there’s no way around it. You’re responsible for more than people realize. That’s where yoga will help. Creating time to stretch and bend your body daily will help you achieve balance no matter what situations you encounter.

Garrett Sarley, president and CEO of the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health, told the Yoga Health Foundation, “Stress sends the entire physical system into overdrive, the muscles tense, the heart beats faster, breathing patterns change, and if the cause of stress isn’t discontinued, the body secretes more hormones that increase blood sugar levels, raising blood pressure. Yoga is one of the few stress-relief tools that has a positive effect on all the body systems involved.”

Yoga won’t eliminate your workload, but it will help you effectively engage your responsibilities without experiencing stress.

3. Teach your staff basic, quick repairs

Small problems create a big inconvenience for patients when your staff doesn’t know how to troubleshoot.

Train your staff to be responsible and self-sufficient

Your staff shouldn’t call you before plunging a clogged toilet or sink in a patient’s room. You might have a maintenance crew that only works nights, but don’t let them wait for the night crew. Teach them to use a plunger, fix a loose toilet handle, tighten a faucet leak, and unclog a drain with a plastic auger. These simple tasks take a few minutes and won’t put extra pressure on you or the patient.

4. Have a routine for staying up-to-date with policies

In addition to running your facilities, it’s imperative to stay up-to-date on government regulations and Medicare/Medicaid policies. Nothing impacts your bottom line like perpetual change and unpredictable payout policies.

It takes a lot of time and energy to discover changes on a regular basis, so you can reduce your workload by hiring someone to do the research for you. Working with the policies will still be a challenge, but it’s not as difficult when you know what’s changing.

To make sure you get the right information from your researcher, create a document with instructions for how and where to gather the information along with proper resources.

• List official websites that publish policy updates
• Provide phone numbers to call for more information with a list of questions to ask
• Create a list of industry-specific keywords that can be used to search for more policy updates in the search engine

When you lighten your load with these tips, you’re directly contributing to your health and a better patient experience.