Smart Healthcare Operations

Smart Healthcare Operations Organizationally aligned education and resources tailored to healthcare leaders' unique needs.

02/04/2025

Do your leaders have access to education that actually empowers them to better achieve organizational goals? Our team at Smart Healthcare Operations creates and delivers high quality engaging education across all modalities - from simple cheat sheets to learning management system courses with assessments.

Our clients say that covering complex concepts during interactive in-person education sessions makes the most meaningful impact - both for department leadership culture and the results achieved in the months following the session.

We have found that thoughtful integration of organization-specific details, such as local systems and processes, makes the difference for leaders perceiving education as a well-intended "waste of time" versus "I've never heard it explained this way!"

Our passion is to crisply and creatively convey complex concepts to broad audiences that meaningfully drive measurable improvement. We'd love to partner with you to design and deliver educational resources that make a difference.

Reach out to discuss the most helpful education tactics for your team at [email protected]

10/29/2024

Speaking of tricks, have you ever experienced the "bait and switch"? Sometimes supervisors miss the opportunity to communicate, leaving team members feeling like they missed the memo. While this can feel uncomfortable, it is most often an honest mistake. With so many responsibilities, thoughtful communication and expectation setting can fall through the cracks for even the best leaders.

The best way for your team to meet your expectations is for them to know what they are… and the best way to communicate them is through structured education offerings to make sure nothing falls through the cracks! Don't trip over the finish line with your strategic plan - ensure both new and tenured leaders are provided the tools and education they need to help your organization succeed!

At Smart Healthcare Operations, customizing education is our passion! We specialize in transforming complex topics like labor management, benchmarking, and zero-based grids into approachable learning experiences for your leaders. We'd be delighted to support this important work in your organization ❤️

09/03/2024

"We have too many FTEs" is an opinion, not a plan.

CFOs doing their best to make financial ends meet often reach out to labor benchmark consultants for a solution. Intellectually dishonest vendors regularly share 8-figure $$ savings opportunities by comparing raw and unreviewed data to 25th percentile performance of their current members.

Why? To make the sale, of course.

How do we know this? Because our team is regularly called upon to sort out the aftermath in an organization that has now lost trust in their leadership after they chose to update budgeted productivity targets to a number from a vendor database and are feeling the impact of their decision.

If you've ever lived through a Q1 "back to budget" plan, you intimately understand the impact to leaders, staff, and more. Forcing departments to cut shifts overnight and operate to benchmark-based productivity targets that have not been validated to support operations swiftly and silently tears down an organization's hard-won accomplishments over decades from engagement to quality and everything in between. This "silver bullet" approach does not promote improvement - financial or otherwise.

Both of these statements are true:
1 - Benchmark data is very valuable in understanding how we operate compared to our peers.
2 - Benchmark data is misused by many and can materially impact the care we provide and ultimately harm organizational viability.

Beware the idea of the "silver bullet" and connect with your finance leaders to ensure they have more information than what a salesperson provides them.

To learn more about how to effectively use benchmark information, sign up for our newsletter here: https://www.caracookconsulting.com/subscribe

08/13/2024

Does your organization use productivity benchmarks to make staffing decisions? How confident are you that the data is being used to help and does not (inadvertently) cause harm?

Benchmark data is incredibly valuable. At the same time, changing staffing levels based on unvalidated data reported from peers is a very serious responsibility that can impact patient care, employee engagement, and the financial picture. Responsibility for these decisions simply must not be taken lightly.

Productivity benchmark reports can seem complex, but in reality, they are simple summaries of volumes and hours from thousands of submitting departments! Their purpose is to paint a picture of individual department performance compared to the group to better understand performance improvement opportunities.

All department leaders know from experience that staffing models are informed by far more than a single patient volume indicator. Patient mix, unit churn, and geographical layout just scratch the surface of the detail that should be understood before taking the reported benchmark opportunity at face value. The volume indicator only highlights POTENTIAL opportunity to be explored further.

In order to effectively leverage labor and productivity benchmarks to improve performance without inadvertently making matters worse, it is critical to remain committed to understanding the nuances. Avoiding common pitfalls is critical for organizations working to support both care and long term financial viability.

If you'd like to learn more about benchmarking and other labor management tools, check out our course offerings here at www.SmartHealthcareOperations.com

07/30/2024

Has this ever happened to you…? I certainly hope not. For new leaders in particular, this can be a gut-wrenching experience.

Arbitrary productivity target changes - particularly during the annual budget process - are incredibly common. Make no mistake - scrambling to rework a staffing plan is no cakewalk - especially with FTE reductions that come with little to no warning!

We should never ask department leaders to perform to an arbitrary target without a plan. This plan should include workload ratios and published hours of operation. It's also crucial to understand how FTE reductions could impact other critical metrics like patient satisfaction, quality of care, staff efficiency, market dynamics, and physician engagement.

07/17/2024

What does the CFO mean when they ask departments to "get to the 50th%tile"? How many FTEs must be reduced or added to perform at this precise level of efficiency? What would the new productivity target be? The answer varies by department, which commonly confuses leaders.

In high performing organizations, finance administration and staffing leaders zoom out to review the organizational landscape. A summarized view of department opportunities brings visibility, as some departments exceed the goal, while others are still working towards it. This creates an opportunity to "level out" the variation in an FTE neutral way and ensures significant variances are not lost in the overall hospital average.

PS: We've said it before, but we'll say it again - NEVER change a target arbitrarily!
https://www.facebook.com/caracookconsulting/posts/pfbid0uAx3dzcpj8BgxUotgtxdyo9o1K63VhQFi3bwtPzaiosc7Vs3xix29NjcfcHEJSMul

07/10/2024

Does your CFO wish your department operated at the 50th%tile? The 75th%tile? The 35th? Benchmark data is a summary of submitted volume and hours data from our peers and requires understanding basic statistics to apply (which is why it is often done incorrectly…)

As a reminder, hospitals submit data quarterly to benchmark vendors, who compile thousands of department submissions to show how we measure up against each other. Peer hours/volume performance typically forms a normal distribution. From this, users can learn about performance ranges, outliers, and the median—commonly known as the 50th percentile of the peers included.

If your hours/UOS performance falls near the middle - around the 50%tile - this implies that if every peer had the same volume as you, roughly half would be more productive (running at a lower/leaner Worked Hour Per UOS), and roughly half would be less productive (running at a higher/richer Worked Hour Per UOS).

Understanding benchmarking data allows us to see how we perform compared to our peers and identify potential improvement opportunities. Educate yourself! 💫 The more you know…

07/03/2024

Have you ever wondered how the workload metric that drives your department's productivity target was chosen? Most likely, the decision came down to effort vs accuracy.

Selecting the right statistic can be tricky, as no single stat perfectly captures department workload. However, some do a better job of describing workload than others!

The central sterile department is a great example. Particularly in organizations with a high proportion of orthopedic surgeries (or other procedures that are short in duration and require a lot of trays and instruments), this is a common discussion. While trays is far more representative of workload for CS, trays are considered a "manual statistic." In finance-world, a manual statistic means "we must hand-collect this data and ensure it is received and entered into the system by the end of every day - even on weekends." This is a conundrum for many departments.

The accuracy of productivity reporting relies heavily on volume or workload data automatically flowing into the productivity system for the prior day before a certain time the next morning in order to run reports. We always prefer accuracy, but are we willing to put in the manual work?

This scenario makes it difficult enough to choose the best workload statistic for productivity reporting… so how do we choose the best statistic for benchmark comparisons? The answer: carefully! 🙂

P.S. The denominator of your department's productivity target goes by many names in the industry. Consultants like me say "workload," CFOs say stat, UOS, volume, or even KVI. These are different words that mean the same thing!

06/26/2024

What is an "un-benchmarked" FTE? It is an FTE excluded from benchmark data comparisons, which can - in excess - severely understate resources in peer comparison analyses.

Why is this practice permitted?

Benchmark data requires FTEs to be categorized into functional areas to support comparison analyses. When FTEs don’t easily fit into an established functional area, we sometimes have no choice but to exclude them from the analysis. However, this is a very gray area, and a slippery slope...

When organizations exclude their department FTEs from benchmark data submissions in excess, for innocent or more financial/political reasons, it significantly skews the data. In these cases, benchmark data reports their organization's performance on the same volumes much closer to the 25th%tile. To be candid, they are cheating!

Every participant submitting performance data for benchmarking must evaluate exceptions regularly to support accurate comparisons. Review these un-benchmarked FTEs annually and ensure they never represent more than 5% of your total FTEs!

06/19/2024

Comparison is the root of all unhappiness… but if we must, let's at least make sure we are comparing apples-to-apples! 🍎

Introducing Normalization: the benchmark data vendors' method of manipulating our own data to create a more fair comparison for analysis. As you might have guessed, attention to detail is key in this process!

Responsible hospital executives ensure fair benchmarking comparisons by normalizing their departments' data. If a department includes non-standard functions, they normalize these FTEs to their respective department.

For example, if your emergency department cost center includes registration FTEs, it's important to assign these FTEs to the registration department within your benchmark data submission. Otherwise, departments may falsely appear overstaffed (or understaffed) compared to peers!

Top Tip: Without normalizations, benchmark comparisons will always be apples to oranges! Remember to complete this critical step.

06/12/2024

The word BENCHMARK evokes many strong emotions in hospital leaders because of the way it is commonly used, but … what IS it? TLDR: It's just data.

Labor benchmarking information is compiled from data submitted quarterly by participating hospitals. The information compares staffing levels between similarly sized departments which can provide context when setting productivity goals.

Benchmark data is valuable and it is misused by many - both of these statements are true!

Follow along to learn how to appropriately use benchmark information at your hospital.

06/05/2024

I hate to say it, but purchasing benchmark data costs hospitals far more than they could ever save in most cases. While peer performance data can be incredibly valuable when working to identify opportunity, knowledge is not enough to manifest savings and turn hospital finances around.

A common mistake among new leaders is aiming for median benchmark targets without ensuring their operations can meet these standards. Prioritizing peer performance over budgeted targets can undermine the quality of care and strategic goals.

TOP TIP: Goals must be accompanied by an action plan to drive change!

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