Operations & Performance Improvement
In today’s volatile economic environment, achieving strong operational performance has never been more important – or more challenging – for healthcare executives and the organizations they lead. With reimbursement and access to capital declining while uncompensated care, physician financial support requests, competition, and quality/outcomes requirements are increasing, hospital finances are strained like never before. As a healthcare executive, you must seek out and employ the best strategies to close performance gaps and efficiently manage operations for long-term financial viability and to sustain your vital healthcare mission.
ECG’s highly capable consultants have the expertise and broad experience to assist you in identifying and analyzing your areas of opportunity and then designing, launching, and supporting a transformative operations improvement effort that makes more efficient use of resources and improves financial performance. This might include redesigning workflows, altering staff patterns, implementing technology solutions, reengineering management roles, or renegotiating supply contracts. Regardless of the ECG recommendation, our goal is to help improve results in the near-term, and to help you strengthen the hospital’s core and prepare it to weather the next downturn – and the next upturn – more successfully.
ECG assists clients with a comprehensive three-phased approach to operations improvement, which can be applied enterprise-wide or to selected departments, service lines, or functional areas. Our process includes:
- Diagnostic assessments that are data-driven to pinpoint high-priority areas of opportunity for operations improvement and identify corresponding improvement targets.
- Action planning to determine the approaches necessary to achieve the targeted improvements and the elements necessary to drive accountability, including specific tasks, deadlines, single-point responsibility, performance targets, and reporting mechanisms.
- Implementation support for initiating and sustaining the improvement efforts while engaging management, physicians and staff in the process.
ECG’s disciplined and rigorous approach will help you change underlying processes and track results across an array of organizational indicators, enabling you to do more – and do better – with less.
Selected Projects
Our clients frequently seek our assistance with a wide range of performance improvement initiatives, including the following examples:
- Hospital-wide or department specific performance benchmarking.
- Patient throughput improvement and capacity enhancement.
- Work process redesign.
- Labor and non-labor expense reduction initiatives.
- Matching staffing to patterns of demand.
- Organizational structure and management span of control analysis.
- Development of performance metrics and dashboards.
