John Hansmann, MSIE, LFHIMSS, DSHS

To cut costs, healthcare leaders are looking at their greatest operating expense—labor management. However, with outdated labor management systems, decision makers rely on retrospective, incomplete data to forecast staffing volumes and patient support needs. Limited workforce insight can result in misaligned staffing or worse, jeopardizing patient care due to lack of labor support. With the Health Catalyst PowerLabor™ application, part of the Financial Empowerment Suite™, decision makers have access to a comprehensive view of labor data by organization, department, team, and job role. Timely insight into current and future hospital needs allows leaders to staff to patient volume, control escalating labor expenses, and ensure optimal resources for excellent patient care.

Health system resource strain became an urgent concern early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Hard-hit areas exhausted their hospital beds, ventilators, personal protective equipment, staffing, and other life-saving essentials, while other regions scrambled to prepare for inevitable surges.
这些资源关切加剧了准确、本地化医院能力规划的必要性。在最初的2020年春季危机之后，夏季的几个月里又出现了几波感染，卫生系统必须继续预测可预见的未来的资源需求。
An accurate capacity planning tool uses population demographics, governmental policies, local culture, and the physical environment to predict healthcare resource needs and help health systems prepare for surges in patient demand.

While the world waits for a vaccine or effective treatment for COVID-19, managing disease spread is paramount. For health systems, patient and staff contact tracing is one of the top transmission-control strategies.
Because the virus appears to spread mainly through respiratory droplets from person-to-person contact, knowing where infected individuals have been and with whom they’ve been in contact is an essential capability.
有了这种洞察力，各组织就可以通过数据驱动的应急计划和监测能力来管理传输。由此产生的适当和及时的工作流程修改将服务于2020年大流行期间的疾病控制工作，并帮助卫生系统为未来的疫情做好准备。

Healthcare process improvement leaders not only have to be a jack-of-all-trades, but they need to be a master, as well. This is one of the most important leadership roles in the healthcare system with responsibilities that can ultimately end up saving lives, improving the patient experience, improving caregiver job satisfaction, and reducing costs. Although there are many others, these eight skills are the most critical for the efficient, and ultimately, successful process improvement leader:

1. Communication
2. Trust Building
3. Coaching
4. Understanding Process Management
5. Understanding Care Management Personnel
6. Constructive Accountability and Constructive Conflict
7. Resiliency and Persistency
8. Seeing the Big Picture

加上正确的培训、教育和赞助，很容易理解为什么这个角色融合了许多艺术和科学的元素。

When expenses exceed revenue, business has a financial problem. In healthcare, the focus has been on revenue for so long, we’ve lost sight of runaway costs brought about by high labor and technology expenses, inefficient use of resources, and supply waste. Recognizing the cost problem is a big first step toward solving it.

Five expense-controlling strategies can play a significant role in returning healthcare systems to a stronger financial position:

1. Refocus on labor management.
2. Manage employed physicians.
3.Change the patient encounter environment.
4. Augment standard approaches with technology.
5. Manage patient access and flow through the healthcare system.

With new, value-based payment structures, shrinking margins, and decreasing reimbursements, this insight offers some new ways to think about expense inefficiency and how to get costs under control.