Fred Lee, author of If Disney Ran Your Hospital, recently shared these thoughts about hospital financial performance with HFMA:
Let’s say that the lab decides to stop stapling lab test reports to the patient charts. By making that decision, they have saved some money in their department. Now instead of going to the nurse’s station and, in a gesture of service and courtesy, stapling the lab tests to the patient charts, they simply drop the lab tests on the desk and walk off. Shifting that kind of work obviously does not improve the financial performance, because you’re not eliminating the work, but you’re asking somebody to do this work who isn’t as familiar with doing it as the lab staff is.
That’s the number-one thing that I wish CFOs would look at. For instance, I’ve heard that some hospitals, before approving the department budgets, require every department to submit its budget first to a committee that represents the front-line caregivers, such as nurses or therapists. These front-line caregivers get to look at the budgets to ensure that a department didn’t improve its budget by pushing work onto them. That way, CFOs can get help in scrutinizing budgets to stop this kind of behavior. The overall financial performance is what a CFO is interested in. Success isn’t achieved by simply making every department squeeze its budget as thin as possible, which creates all kinds of pain in the organization that, left unattended, causes the organization to become dysfunctional.
You can read more from Fred Lee in the May issue of hfm magazine. And you can hear more from Fred Lee in person on Wednesday, June 21, at HFMA's upcoming Annual National Institute.
