Improving Your Bottom Line!!!

Many hospitals with long history of financial success are going through unprecedented tough times as a result of reimbursement changes, general economic factors, and changes brought about by advances in technology, medicine and pharmaceuticals. If you have responsibility for financial results, here is a quick action step check list of specific things you can do to optimize the hospital's position.

Revenue Management

1. Is the Charge Master up to date?
2. Is coding being done correctly? An amazing number of hospitals leave money on the table because of coding errors and omissions resulting in under billing for medically-necessary services that were appropriately provided.
3. Does your medical staff provide sufficient medical record documentation so that coding and billing can generate all revenue that the hospital is due for care provided?Is the medical staff knowledgeable and supportive about compliance issues?

Expense Management

1. How do staffing levels in your hospital compare to the competition? Have you benchmarked department staffing recently? Practices change and so do department activity volumes.
2. Does each hospital department have and use workload-based department productivity standards, department staffing templates and the monitoring mechanisms in place to support their effective use?
3. Is department activity data being reported accurately? More than 70% of U.S. acute care hospitals are attempting to manage with data that contain significant errors and omissions.
4. Are your departments' staff scheduling methods designed to produce budget results? Do department staff scheduling methods provide real-time feedback to managers on the budget impact of staff scheduling decisions?
5. Is your work force designed to support activity-based staffing? Does each department employ an appropriate mix of full-time core staff and part-time staff based on analysis of workload patterns?
6. Does Materials Management use established economic order quantities and reorder points? Does it track and record inventory turns?
7. Does the hospital employ a system of utilization benchmarking? For example, the pharmacy may be operating efficiently in terms of the number of unit doses dispensed per paid hour but if your physicians are over-prescribing drugs the net effect is negative, not only in terms of unnecessary labor and drug expense but potentially in terms of quality. Similarly, your laundry may be operating very efficiently in terms of laundry pounds per paid hour but how does the number of laundry pounds generated per patient day compare against other hospitals?

When you can respond positively to each check list item, you will have made a tremendous positive impact on the hospital's bottom line.