Increase Profitability – Drive New Revenue
Light reading today – healthcare is becoming harder to navigate and reaching profitability for hospitals will become difficult due to all of the pressures being put on hospitals by governmental influencers who are themselves struggling. That’s the basic gist of this article from Bob Herman – although he does a good job of trying to solve the problem by detailing 11 items that hospitals can focus on to drive revenue. I like all of his points, but wanted to focus my attention on those that Cohealo can assist hospitals in attaining.
1. Add new service lines
Richard Rico, CFO of Sky Lakes Medical Center said, “A growing and aging population on the horizon may also spur hospitals to dip their toes into new services to reach more patients – as long as the return on investment is both immediate and sustainable.” How more immediate can it be than to begin offering a new service line with $0 capital outlay? Cohealo allows hospitals to test the waters with new service lines before investing into them fully. As we mobilize existing assets from locations to another location that may want to introduce Orthopedics, the ‘test drive’ can be used to justify the new service line and to ascertain the true volume of cases before any new assets are purchased. The best part is that if the service line is not sustainable you just stop mobilizing the asset – you don’t have to deal with a poor purchase decision! Move on and try a new service line – don’t worry, we’ll help you mobilize that equipment too.
2. Standardize physician preference items
Cohealo can mobilize more than just OR devices, we are currently working with other equipment and instrumentation that allows a health system to purchase more standardized assets that can then be mobilized across all locations to meet physician needs. Per Bill Fera’s comments in the article – Cohealo is performing value analysis on all types of assets in an ongoing manner so that we can advise our partners on purchasing decisions and we can use these national best practices with any customer to help drive adoption of this type of purchasing process.
3. Pay attention to quality incentive programs
“For hospitals, this means care must be efficiently delivered at the right place at the right time at a low cost with the highest standards of quality in mind.” Love this quote – Cohealo has been preaching right place–right time–low cost–high quality for 2 years and we’re seeing the results with customers around the nation. This is important as hospitals who do not meet the demands of these programs will lose out on their funding – meaning less profitability.
4. Consider affiliations or more concrete transactions
Cohealo built a partnership model whereby we go at risk with our customers, we deliver a service but only after we invest into our customer’s collaborative infrastructure. This means that our relationship IS concrete. Once we go live with a customer our goal is to assist with all purchasing and consumption activities in regards to assets – how can we partner to drive economies of scale and reduce costs to our partners? There are many options and we are currently building out many service offerings to ensure that our customers reduce costs, drive new revenues and optimize profitability.
Mr. Rico made a few more comments that I’d like to address. “Look within the OR, ED and home health arenas for throughput issues. The OR, ER and home health areas are havens for inefficiency due to varying factors such as missed appointments, mismanaged scheduling, poor capacity management…We’re doing an analysis in the OR to find out: Here’s how you should do a case and handle throughput, here’s where logjams are and here’s how you can streamline it.” Per a previous blog post I mentioned that the OR is the highest cost center but also the largest revenue driver in a hospital. Cohealo’s focus is to help our customers manage their physician schedules, assets, OR rooms, and instruments through a continuous analysis and agile improvement process.
As a software developer, we utilize our agile development thought process in our operations team and continuously take best practices from across the nation and build out a best practices methodology that can be instilled into any health system, any hospital, any OR – anywhere.
As always, let me know if you have any feedback – the conversation rages on and Cohealo will be here participating. Till next time…