How Technology Drives Operational Efficiency in Healthcare
12 minute read
To say that operational efficiency is a matter of life or death for hospitals isn’t an overstatement. Think of it this way: operational efficiency could mean the difference between having a bed available for a patient being rushed to the emergency room at their local hospital and having to send them to a facility further away, delaying treatment and risking their condition worsening in the process.
Ultimately, the more efficiently a hospital operates, the more beds it has available to incoming patients, the more promptly its physicians can attend to patients, and the better its overall patient outcomes. This is good news not only for patients but also for hospital leaders. Improved patient outcomes and optimized patient experiences translate to better financial performance, regulatory compliance, greater employee satisfaction, and stronger competitive standing.
In this blog post, we’ll look at some of the major obstacles to operational efficiency in healthcare settings and share insights into how technology is helping hospitals optimize efficiency.
To say that operational efficiency is a matter of life or death for hospitals isn’t an overstatement. Think of it this way: operational efficiency could mean the difference between having a bed available for a patient being rushed to the emergency room at their local hospital and having to send them to a facility further away, delaying treatment and risking their condition worsening in the process.
Ultimately, the more efficiently a hospital operates, the more beds it has available to incoming patients, the more promptly its physicians can attend to patients, and the better its overall patient outcomes. This is good news not only for patients but also for hospital leaders. Improved patient outcomes and optimized patient experiences translate to better financial performance, regulatory compliance, greater employee satisfaction, and stronger competitive standing.
In this blog post, we’ll look at some of the major obstacles to operational efficiency in healthcare settings and share insights into how technology is helping hospitals optimize efficiency.
Key Areas in Need of Optimization
In order to improve the patient experience and turn hospitals into profitable healthcare facilities, hospital leaders focus on the following areas of operational efficiency:
Patient Flow
Patient flow describes the movement of patients throughout a hospital or other healthcare facility, from initial intake to discharge. By streamlining patient flow, hospitals can ensure that patients receive prompt treatment, which can reduce their length of stay and improve patient outcomes. From an operational standpoint, it’s important to improve patient flow because it can help lower costs, enhance the provider experience, and reduce the risk of overcrowding.
Patient Transfers
A patient transfer is the process by which hospital staff moves a patient from one location within the hospital to another, or from one healthcare facility to another. Patient transfers typically take place when a patient requires specialized treatment when they’re moving to a post-acute care facility for further treatment, or when they’re transitioning to hospice or home care.
It’s important that hospitals be efficient when transferring patients, as moving a patient from one department or facility to another often frees up bed space and other resources. That said, patient transfer methods can be complex and may require specialized equipment to complete, so having detailed documentation defining dependencies and effective communication are essential to a safe and successful transfer.
Discharge Management
The process of discharging a patient from hospital care can include many steps and may require specialized support or equipment. After all, not all patients who leave the hospital are fully recovered — they no longer require high-level care, but they may still need additional support at home or to enroll in an aftercare or rehabilitation program.
Although hospitals need to optimize discharge efficiency so that resources can be reallocated to patients who need urgent care, it’s also important that patients leaving the hospital receive any materials they may need for continued care and clearly understand the next steps in their care pathway.
Bed Flow
Closely related to patient flow, bed flow refers to the management of available hospital beds. The more beds available, the more incoming patients a hospital can accept; as a result, bed flow has a direct impact on effective patient flow, and vice versa. Bed flow is a form of both resource and capacity management and, when handled appropriately, can help hospitals deliver timely care, control costs, and comply with regulations pertaining to the quality of patient care and safety.
Resource Management
As one can likely infer, healthcare resource management refers to the strategic allocation of hospital resources — including staff, equipment, supplies, and available beds — in order to provide timely care to patients. Efficient and effective resource management can help hospitals prevent delays in treatment, reduce the risk of staff burnout, eliminate waste, and lower operating costs.
Capacity Management
Closely related to resource management, hospital capacity management informs how resources are allocated within a hospital based on past, present, and future demand. To achieve this, hospitals must take stock of which resources are currently in use and which ones are available — that is, their available capacity — and compare this forecasted demand. To ensure that these forecasts are accurate and that they have the available capacity to meet potential surges in demand, hospitals need to be able to apply data analytics to historical data.
Major Obstacles to Hospital Operational Efficiency
Listed below are just a few of the factors that prevent hospitals from achieving optimal operational efficiency:
Paperwork-intensive Processes & Inaccurate Data
We’ve all filled out paperwork in a clinical office’s waiting room, taking great pains to provide accurate information about our medical history, only for a doctor to ask us for the same information when we enter the exam room.
The reason for this is that health record systems are notoriously slow, and, in some cases, data is stored in multiple different locations, preventing nurses and doctors from getting an accurate view of their patients. These repeat questions are physicians’ way of validating the information available to them so that they can more accurately diagnose and treat their patients.
This problem isn’t unique to primary care providers but applies to hospitals, as well. It can take a significant amount of time for nurses to manually enter patient information into health record systems — a 2018 study showed that nurses between 19% to 35% of their practice time documenting care. This eats up substantial time that could be better spent running tests or attending to patients.
Because manual data entry is such a time-consuming process, it’s often left to the last minute, meaning electronic health records (EHRs) are often outdated, especially if the person entering that data has misremembered any pertinent details. Without access to accurate, up-to-date information, physicians struggle to make informed decisions about patient care, which can jeopardize the quality of care. It also prevents hospitals from determining which patients are ready to be discharged, eating up precious resources and potentially preventing more high-level cases from receiving immediate treatment.
Slow & Ineffective Communication
Picture this: You’re a patient at a hospital, and your attending physician has ordered a battery of lab tests to determine whether you’re eligible for release. Now, let’s say lab results come back the same day, but due to outdated systems and poor communication, one of a few things happens:
- Your doctor does not even realize your test results are available, and so does not have the opportunity to evaluate them and render a decision
- Your doctor finds out that your test results are available, but does not have an easy way to access or evaluate them while attending to other patients and, therefore, cannot render a decision
- Your doctor decides that you are eligible for release but isn’t able to communicate their decision to your care team in time for them to coordinate your discharge
- Your doctor decides that you are eligible for release but communicates this at the very last minute, giving your care team very little time to coordinate your discharge
The first three scenarios would lead you to spend another night in the hospital, constraining already limited hospital resources; compromising available capacity; and increasing costs for you, your insurance company, and the hospital itself. The fourth scenario would lead to you being discharged without enough time to contact family or friends and coordinate pickup, which creates a bad patient experience.
Slow and ineffective communication due to outdated systems and a lack of visibility is an all-too-common issue in hospital settings and seriously impedes hospital operational efficiency.
Lack of Visibility
It’s essential that hospital staff be able to see where patients, fellow staff members, equipment, available beds, and other resources are at all times. Unfortunately, few hospitals have this degree of visibility, which negatively impacts operational efficiency in healthcare. Without a holistic view, doctors and nurses have trouble locating the resources they require to administer timely care to patients, hospital leaders are unable to get an accurate assessment of available capacity, and hospitals struggle to utilize resources effectively.
Poorly Defined Care Paths
Care pathways, or care paths, are the standard operating procedures hospitals and other healthcare facilities rely on when making decisions about patient care. Care paths are intended to outline every step of the care process for physicians, nurses, and patients alike, including initial intake, treatment plan, discharge, and all of their dependencies and interdependencies. Care pathways should also include clear next steps for patient aftercare, such as outpatient or rehabilitation programs, follow-up appointment schedules, and at-home guidance to ensure a successful recovery.
When well-defined, care paths can streamline every aspect of patient care, improving hospital operational efficiency and promoting positive patient outcomes. Conversely, a poorly defined care pathway can make it more challenging for hospital staff to determine appropriate next steps, delaying treatment, creating bottlenecks in patient and bed flow, and leading to ineffective resource utilization. Additionally, without clear next steps to follow during the aftercare stage, patients may struggle to adhere to their treatment plan, which negatively impacts outcomes and can increase their risk of readmission.
How to Improve Efficiency in Healthcare Using Technology
For many hospitals and other healthcare facilities, technology could hold the key to improving operational efficiency and delivering value-based care. Automation, analytics, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence all have the ability to eliminate bottlenecks, reduce manual effort, provide full visibility, streamline communications, and help hospitals run like well-oiled machines.
Here are just a few of the ways hospitals can benefit from the right blend of technology:
- Through the power of automation, facilities can automatically capture patient data, validate it, and update patients’ EHRs, saving nursing staff valuable time that would have been otherwise spent manually entering information. By automating this step of the process, hospitals can also reduce the risk of erroneous or duplicate data, ensuring that healthcare providers are making treatment decisions based on the most accurate and up-to-date information.
- Once a hospital has captured a patient’s data, it can store it in a secure, HIPAA-compliant centralized repository accessible only to physicians and nurses. By consolidating this data, hospitals make it easier for their staff to access it via mobile devices, dashboards at the emergency department or in the nurses’ station, in patients’ rooms on smaller panels, and so on.
In addition to accuracy of information, this supports real-time communication and collaboration, enabling doctors to render decisions about patient treatment, transfer, and release in a timely manner. With greater visibility comes optimized patient flow, bed flow, hospital resource management, capacity management, and more. - Hospitals can also create automated workflows based on predefined care paths, giving providers and patients alike a clear view into the next step (or steps) of their treatment plan. These care paths can be based on standard procedures, such as elective surgery, or even common symptoms, for emergency admissions. Physicians can even pre-authorize patient discharge and aftercare based on what the patient is seeking treatment for, further streamlining patient flow and improving discharge management.
- Hospitals can embed radio frequency identification (RFID) tags into everything from staff badges to patient bracelets to equipment tags. When mapped against hospital schematics, this provides a holistic view into where patients and resources are located and, in the case of hospital staff and assets, which are currently in use. This degree of visibility aids real-time decision-making, ensuring that doctors and nurses know which resources are available to them at any given time, and prevents undue delays in treatment.
Hospitals can even pull utilization data using these RFID tags, giving leaders a better view into resource demand so that they can make more informed hiring and purchasing decisions. - Using digital twin technology, hospitals can use internet of things (IoT) spatial intelligence to create virtual replicas of patients. Each twin — or model — is embedded with actual patient data, enabling hospital staff to monitor patient progress against expected outcomes and leaders to run predictive algorithms against that model.
When looking at these models in aggregate, physicians can better predict care pathways for individual patients, in some cases down to the minute that they’ll be discharged. Hospital leaders gain a more accurate view of both planned and unplanned volume, which they’re then able to use to generate a forward-looking view of resource demand. Armed with this information, hospital leaders can better anticipate available capacity and future needs, enhancing their decision-making abilities. - Technology can even play an important role in aftercare, providing patients with easy access to remote engagement and telehealth services. By making treatment more accessible to a wider range of patients, healthcare professionals can increase the likelihood of treatment plan adherence and improve patient outcomes.
Transform the Patient & Member Experiences
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Download Your CopyAll in all, with access to the right technology, hospitals and other healthcare facilities can move away from a reactive, triage approach and instead engage in more predictive decision-making based on the most accurate and up-to-date information. The end result is timely, value-based care; optimized resource and capacity management; lower operating costs; and a better overall experience for both patients and providers.
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