Healthcare savings: Cutting costs without cutting headcount

When you think of cutting costs in your hospital, what are the key areas you look at?

If you’re like many healthcare organizations, you probably consider the immediate and uncomfortable solutions such as outsourcing, job cuts and delaying equipment upgrades to reduce expenditures. But have you considered that a main source of wasted time and money could be stemming from inefficient data management strategies?

It’s impossible to ignore the mounting external financial pressures resulting from fluctuating rules and regulations. However, in order to properly address these challenges, you must first address internal financial pressures such as administrative errors, workflow mismanagement and billing redundancies.

With the U.S. health information systems market expected to see higher growth over the next seven years in the non-clinical segment, it’s safe to say we’re now in the post-EHR era. This shift means it’s high time for hospitals to take a close look at how their data is being processed from one system to the next and where gaps might be causing errors resulting in financial loss. This is especially important as hospitals face decreasing reimbursements and increasing operating costs.

In fact, these types of pressures are impacting the way you should look at every part of your business, including making sure that the environment and technologies that you provide best fit your staff’s needs and work styles. Due to the large amounts of data healthcare organizations accumulated via their EHR and HIS, data management can seem somewhat daunting. However, if you’ve structured your hospital for successful data management, you can reap the financial benefits of a more productive staff and efficient workflow.

This can include building strategies to:

1. Analyze administrative capacity and operational efficiency.

2. Address gaps in care.

3. Improve security and compliance.

With this approach, you will be able to achieve information mobility, creating a seamless interaction between your staff, technologies and workflow environment to capture, access and share critical information — any place, any time.