Hospitals struggle with the economic slowdown, short staffing, and excessive expenses throughout the year. Hospital administration is tricky, from hiring top talent with excellent remuneration to stocking the facility with high-end medications and machines. It is not easy to control hospital costs as each piece of equipment costs millions, and maintenance alone can make a significant amount.
Leasing lab equipment
Hospitals can control costs using various strategies, including reforming the shift and enabling physicians to attend to more patients. Renting out a part of the hospital’s space or equipment is another option. Several hospitals have tons of unused equipment locked up while some struggle to get their hands on them to treat the patients better.
Hospitals can share their labs and equipment with others to earn money or rent common equipment in labs from Excedr.com instead of purchasing everything new. It will help them cut down on cost and return the equipment once used, saving space in the hospital. Hospitals can also resell their old machines and laboratory necessities to Excedr.com for a minimal profit.
Streamlining process
Streamlining the hospital management process helps enormously in cutting down costs and increasing profits. It is common to see several patients waiting to visit a doctor in most crowded hospitals. Hospitals can easily avoid it by modernizing the appointment booking system and making the patients visit only when needed.
Hospital process streamlining also helps in managing the workload of all the doctors equally without burning them out. Sharing workload and framing a quick method to diagnose and treat patients will enable the doctors to see more patients per day. It saves operational costs by avoiding overbed allocation, patients waiting for long hours using hospital properties, etc.
Providing virtual services
Providing virtual services from the hospital helps control the cost heavily as well-trained nurses can advise on most cases. Most of the patients with everyday ailments can get treated using video calls are webcam calls by experienced hospital staff and nurses following the doctors’ guidelines. It will save the doctors ample time, and the hospital can use them to perform other tasks or attend to more severe patients.
Virtual medical services are a boon for inquiries and the other doubt clearing sessions as the one assigned person can answer all the queries directly. The reception staff need not keep the phone for all day and concentrate on finishing the admin work quickly and efficiently.
Re-use labors with some extra training
If the workers have free time, give them rest and make them work part-time to control costs. Else, they can get training to specialize in a particular area and use their talent can in other aspects of hospital management. Such processes eliminate the need to recruit and train new employees and require only an increment.
If a ward boy gets the proper mechanical equipment to clean floors in half of his work time, train him to be a paramedic and assist in an ambulance case. The account section staff equipped with the latest software to finish their job half-time can help with taxes and insurance.
Track hidden costs in operation
Every process has a loophole, and hospitals generally have plenty of them for surplus spending. Examine the process using various techniques like Six Sigma to determine where the process lags and money gets spent unwantedly. Eliminate the process causing wastage or reform it to avoid wastage and create a new integrated strategy to increase productivity.
It is vital to notice the operations fully from the supply chain to customer service to identify weak points and patch them up efficiently. Once the loophole gets identified, talk with all the concerned employees and keep the change process transparent to make them understand how to save money.
