Crawl, walk, run: A roadmap to lower total cost of ownership
Admit it, your organization needs help in many areas. Costly inefficiencies and poor business process management are affecting your bottom line. However, the knee-jerk reaction leads down the road of finding the most economical solution to solve only one problem.
Then, you address the next issue with another niche solution. Over time, your organization and care centers are operating with many niche solutions that become confusing and expensive to individually maintain and support.
That’s why you should be looking to address issues across your entire organization while minimizing IT sprawl. After all, it’s impossible to provide excellent care if important patient information is hidden in silos.
It is time to get a better understanding of how a healthcare content services solution, on one scalable platform, can benefit post-acute care providers.
Let’s start at the beginning.
Identify the source of pain
Where does it make the most sense to launch a solution? Which department? Or what process? Should you go enterprise-wide right away?
To answer these important questions, consider enlisting the services of expert business consultants to spend time onsite to review the business operations of your organization and come to an agreement on the biggest pain point with the most impact.
Common pain points with solutions many organizations utilize include:
- Poor referral management: Losing referrals due to inefficient business processes and communication with referral sources. Are you even aware you might be missing referrals?
- Poor medical records management of the hard chart with expensive storage costs and no retention policy.
- Poor employee file management and inefficient onboarding while combating high turnover rates. This includes the lack of a retention policy.
- No contract management solution for provider services, legal services or vendors.
- No credentialing.
- Undefined AP/AR business processes.
- Poor revenue cycle management. Are all your write-offs really necessary?
Project 1: Let’s crawl together
Now that you have identified the biggest source of pain, you need to choose the best solution to provide the greatest impact. Keep in mind that any technology you utilize should help your staff provide the best patient care possible; otherwise, it’s tech for tech’s sake.
Next up is discovery and implementation. The best way to accomplish these important tasks is to tap the expertise of the business consultants I mentioned earlier to ensure the solution is configured to meet your requirements. Look for consultants who have been down this road before and know how to accomplish this task best: By ensuring key executive buy-in.
After testing your content services platform, it’s now yours to grow, as departmental needs and budgets dictate. The right platform will include innovative system administration training and ongoing educational opportunities to empower your personnel to take these next steps.
Project 2: Walk on your own
Now that the dust has settled with project 1, and your end users have become comfortable with their new solution, it’s time to address the next pain point. The right platform will be scalable and flexible enough to allow you to accomplish this easily.
This time, your trained system administrators are stepping up with a much bigger role in the project. They take over the configuration and implementation, knowing consulting services are available – as well as 24/7 technical support – to drive success.
Project 3 and beyond: Time to run
Now you have implemented two projects, but the list of pain points is still long. It’s time to take advantage of the available training and leverage your installed content services platform to build and easily configure your own solutions. You may consider new modules or additional licenses, but the core system is already in place and you have the knowledge to build and implement the next solution to optimize the next process.
Your system administrators are now capable of all discovery, configuration and implementation of any future solutions. Consulting services are always available, but unlikely to be necessary, and the 24/7 technical support is only a phone call away to assist with any implementation.
Attaining a low total cost of ownership is a great accomplishment, but again, keep your eyes on the main prize: Empowering staff with the information they need, when they need it, wherever they’re located, to provide excellent patient care.
If you’re ready to run, come talk to us in booth 5743 at HIMSS in March.
