Healthcare is an efficiency-driven enterprise. Patients certainly need it to be. Often, their health hangs in the balance of how quickly the doctors and nurses can figure out what is wrong and treat it. Certainly, their bank balances are also favored by speedy resolutions.
Less obvious to the public is why hospitals themselves also require efficiency to remain solvent. So much is made of the overwhelming costs related to healthcare that it’s easy to forget most hospitals are operating on razor-thin margins.
In this article, we take a look at consultants. What they do, how they can help hospitals, and what difference that increased efficiency might have on the lives of patients.
Bridging Gaps
Streamlined efficiency is particularly important in areas that are resource deficient. Urban hospitals are frequently hindered by how busy they are. Lots of people, usually not enough doctors, nurses, or sometimes even beds, to take care of them all.
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Rural hospitals aren’t doing any better. They may not be flooded by an influx of people, but they often don’t have enough resources to take care of the patients that they do have.
Rural hospital struggles can be neatly packaged into two categories:
- Resource deficiencies– If urban hospitals don’t have the resources to take care of their huge influxes of patients, rural hospitals don’t have enough to do—well. Much of anything. There are a few reasons why. Funding, for one. If the hospital belongs to a large network, the board of directors probably won’t be diverting a significant portion of their limited resources to a hospital that treats a modest number of people. It’s also harder for them to find personnel. A smaller population means fewer locals becoming doctors and nurses. Rural hospitals often need to find incentives to get professionals from other parts of the country to come on board. That can be hard to do, and staffing shortages are often the result.
- Patient limitations– Rural locals may also have a harder time accessing hospital services. Rural hospitals may not serve a large number of people, but they do usually have to cover a significant amount of space. Often an entire county will have only one hospital. Patients with transportation problems will not be able to access those services.
Rural patients often also have financial limitations that keep them from accessing healthcare. For a rural hospital to be effective it needs to find ways to work within its own limitations, and those of its patients to better serve the public at large.
There are many ways to do this. Data implementation. Public outreach. Hiring campaigns. Mobile health technology, and so on. But how can a hospital figure out what steps it needs to take to achieve its goals in a way that is both efficient and impactful?
By utilizing the services of a consultant!
What Do Consultants Do?
Consultants use internal data to help you come up with a bespoke solution for meeting your goals and generally improving efficiency. They usually work freelance, though some large companies will retain the full-time services of a consultant.
There are multiple applications of consultant services, all of which can be of use to a struggling hospital.
Operational Consulting
This is a general evaluation of how a hospital operates and what can be done to help it improve. The consultant will look at your performance data, the tools you use, etc. They will probably also have conversations with your staff to learn more about how your operations look from the inside.
They will use this information to compile recommendations on how you can improve. In the introduction to this article, we talk about increased efficiency. In a general sense, that is always what consultants are trying to achieve, but that is particularly true of general consulting.
Objective Driven Consulting
Let’s say you want to open an outpatient clinic on the outskirts of town. To prepare for this significant investment of money and personnel resources, you need to determine several things:
- What type of services are going to be most impactful?
- What is the ideal location for this clinic?
- How accessible will it be for the patients living in your area?
- How will you staff, fund, and maintain it in the long run?
Naturally, these are fundamental questions that are a part of any significant business investment or expansion-related consideration. However, they are not always easy to answer.
A consultant can come in, look at your data, community data, etc. and help you come to the right conclusions.
Tech-Related Consulting
Also an efficiency-driven consideration. You want to update your tech infrastructure. Start using data better. Streamline operations. The usual tech-related schpiel. But as you look at all of the various products and services, you realize you have no idea what to get.
Guess who can help? Tech consultants help you cut through all of the options to find solutions that:
- Meet your goals, and
- Work well together.
That second point is particularly important and difficult to achieve. Digital technology at its best links together like pieces of a puzzle. Your accounting department won’t be using the same tech as HR, or billing, or management, but all of those programs need to be able to talk to each other.
Without good integrations, you encounter what industry folks call, “data siloes.” You technically have all of the information you need, but it is all tucked away where the people who need it can’t gain ready access.
Consultants will know how to avoid that. The goal of hiring a consultant is always to improve outcomes and help you land on the best way to accomplish a goal. Of course, they cost money, but their services are usually cheaper than the trial-and-error alternative that you would be using without them. Bottom line? If you want to improve efficiency and better achieve your goals, consultants are one of the best ways to do it.
