Running a healthcare business is a demanding task. Providing your patients with the highest quality service while also ensuring that your business turns a healthy profit can be a tricky balancing act. Being a healthcare provider is a position of huge responsibility. This means that, unlike some other industries, it’s not possible to simply cut corners to save money. Instead, you need to look at your business on an organizational level and find ways to make it operate more efficiently without compromising on the services and quality of care that patients receive.

Striking a balance between offering high-quality care and ensuring your business stays profitable can be a major challenge. Focusing on efficiency is key in this situation. Here, we’ll run through some ideas to help you get started on improving business efficiency. This should help you to continue to offer your patients the best standard of care while also ensuring that your business enjoys even greater success and healthier profits.

Assess Your Current Operation
Improving the efficiency of a healthcare business usually requires a two-fold approach. Firstly, it’s important to look at the efficiency of your staff, the tasks they perform, and how they perform them. Secondly, it’s important to examine the everyday operation of your business, specifically the software and tools that are used to facilitate day-to-day tasks. Assessing your business’s current setup and measuring this against its performance is a helpful way to spot opportunities for improving efficiency.

Diving deeper into the way your business currently operates can churn up some unexpected results. You may notice that your business is spending much more in some areas than expected, and you should be able to spot processes that seem to be taking far longer than needed. Identifying these areas of concern is your first step toward improving efficiency. You can then choose specific areas to focus on improving and find ways to make them operate more efficiently.

Communicate With Your Team
Unfortunately, in many organizations cost saving and efficiency improvements can negatively impact staff. So, the words ‘cutting costs’ and ‘improving efficiency’ can immediately leave staff fearing for their jobs or feeling like they’re being blamed for the company’s issues.

You need your staff to be onboard and engaged with the process when trying to make your healthcare business run more smoothly. You can ensure this happens by reassuring your team that they are valued and that their jobs aren’t at risk. Communicating honestly helps to avoid any confusion that could leave your team less than enthusiastic about helping to improve workplace efficiency.

Making communication a focus for your business going forward is really helpful and can make your healthcare setting a more organized and pleasant place to work. Introducing morning huddles can help your team to feel more included in the company and provides the perfect opportunity for you to update your team on important information. The morning huddle can also be an excellent way to foster greater team work and reduce duplicated effort, as you can highlight any main goals that you want the team to work towards that day, and ensure everyone is clear on the part they have to play to make the day a success.

Seek Feedback
When you communicate with your team, you will likely find that they already have lots of ideas on how their role could be performed more efficiently. They can provide specific feedback relating to the intricacies of their work that you may not be familiar with. Understanding these can help you to spot areas for improvement in the current processes that you have in place, and how equipment or IT issues could be impacting efficiency among your team. So, it’s extremely valuable to invite your team to put forward their own suggestions on how your organization could run more efficiently. This could take the form of feedback questionnaires, in-person conversations, or, if you have the time you could spend a couple of hours shadowing each employee to get a better understanding of how they work.

Once you have received all your feedback, you can begin looking through the responses to detect any common themes. This can often highlight some easy wins for your efficiency improvements and help you to spot any employee pain points that are impacting their productivity.

Streamline Time-Consuming Tasks
Every business has time-consuming tasks that need to be completed. Processing payroll and timesheets are examples of this. Your payroll team may spend a large portion of their time querying timesheets to ensure they are accurate and that staff aren’t being overpaid or underpaid. This can be a major headache and result in disputes over pay with staff, and confusion when matching up timesheets and scheduling working hours. Introducing a system such as Getsling Time Clock ensures timesheets are accurate and makes tracking employee work hours a much simpler task.

Another task that can really add to your team’s workload is the scheduling and re-scheduling of appointments. Your front desk team may struggle to offer the best customer service to every patient that arrives in your clinic if they’re constantly answering the phone. It’s important that every patient receives a friendly welcome when they enter the clinic and that they’re checked in quickly and efficiently for their appointment.

Telephone interruptions can disrupt this important process and lead to patients being booked in late for their appointments. This can have a knock-on effect that causes delays throughout the day and harms the patient experience. Offering patients a choice of how and when to schedule their appointments can help to relieve the pressure on your front desk staff. Introducing the option for patients to manage their appointments online means greater convenience for your patients as they can book appointments at a time that best suits them, and enhances the over all patient experience.

Introduce Training Opportunities for Staff
Investing in your staff by offering them opportunities to increase their skills and knowledge is an excellent way to boost efficiency. This will allow team members to complete a wider range of tasks within your clinic. This additional training can be especially useful when you need to cover employee sickness or time off, as you will have team members on hand with the knowledge needed to complete the task.

Offering your team further opportunities for professional development is also beneficial. Knowing that they can progress their career within your healthcare business can help to encourage employee retention, which means you save the significant time and money needed to recruit and onboard new team members.

Final Thoughts on Improving Efficiency
Improving efficiency is a top priority for many healthcare businesses. From an operational perspective, increasing efficiency is vital for boosting profits. However, efficiency should never be put ahead of patient care. Instead, finding ways to improve the efficiency of your healthcare business should add value to the patient experience. This can be achieved by increasing staff training so that there is always cover if an employee is off sick and patient appointments don’t need to be rescheduled. Providing patients with a system that allows them to manage their own appointments is also valuable and allows them greater flexibility while also reducing the workload of your front desk staff.

There are many improvements that can be made in your healthcare business that will help you to reduce your costs, preserve resources, and also boost the patient experience. These are the foundation of success for your healthcare business and with continual monitoring, they can be built-upon to make even greater efficiency improvements.