It is no secret that hospital leaders are looking for creative ways to contain costs while improving performance outcomes in non-clinical support departments such as housekeeping, food services and patient transportation. It's also no secret that technology is revolutionizing healthcare and can be the linchpin in dramatically improving these desired outcomes. Yet there is a gap between this knowledge and actual results — all which boils down to the way in which hospitals apply it systematically.
Now that Medicare reimbursements are directly tied to both clinical outcomes and patient perception of service, it is more important than ever to maximize support service resources and ensure effective patient interaction. Below are four strategies for all support service disciplines that will affect immediate and meaningful change for any hospital, whether it's via technology or simply reshaping their processes and systems.
1. Leverage the "cloud"
Mobile, cloud-based technologies have advanced dramatically in the last several years, and are now being applied in support-services management. Hospitals and medical professionals have already begun to embrace the use of hand-held devices with regard to clinical care, and bringing this technology to support services can help to optimize communication and improve service delivery in the following ways:
- Smartphones and tablets can be utilized by EVS team members to improve cleaning quality assurance — as well HCAHPS outcomes and bed turnover times.
- Food service team members can employ tablets with customized mobile apps to quickly and accurately process patient dietary requests and reduce costs associated with food waste.
- Mobile apps can also improve patient transportation by leveraging a "crowd-sourcing" philosophy, which can increase overall efficiency per transport by significantly reducing the number of phone calls made to complete each transport, and in some cases, eliminate the need for a dispatcher all together.
2. Increase department leaders' presence on hospital floors
By automating paperwork via mobile, cloud-based technologies, leadership can significantly reduce time spent on office tasks, since routine reporting tasks can be performed and analyzed "on-the-go." This provides a greater opportunity for leaders to identify inefficiencies with regard to waste streams, linen usage, patient room turnover times, transport requests and patient meal delivery. After all, easily-rectified actions, such as improper disposal of non-regulated waste in red bags, poor separation of recyclable materials, incorrect patient meal orders, lags in patient room discharge cleaning, clinical staff members conducting patient transports and inefficient linen management can cost a hospital hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.
Armed with mobile, cloud-based technologies, support service leadership can spend more time coaching their team members, performing quality assurance checks, proactively communicating with hospital clinicians and personally engaging with each patient multiple times during their stay.
3. Systematically educate and prepare front-line team members for patient interaction
Aside from nursing, housekeepers, food service employees and patient transporters have more interaction with patients than any other hospital employees. Yet, they are often not prepared — nor trained — for that responsibility. At hospitals achieving the highest rates of support service patient satisfaction, formal, carefully-designed systems are in place to educate these team members, review their performance and report outcomes.
Providing foundational training — and holding front-line employees accountable to that training on a daily basis — is essential. This helps to ensure desired outcomes and demonstrates that department leaders are committed to the success of each team member. Fundamentally, a formal support service training program should include the following elements:
- A formal hospitality training program to establish key best practices for desired results inclusive of prescribed patient service techniques.
- Daily documented patient-interaction rounding to observe how well team members utilize prescribed patient service techniques.
- Clearly identifiable, up-to-date patient satisfaction results, by unit, posted in team member common areas 24/7.
- Daily training huddles prior to each shift, designed to educate, publicly recognize outstanding team member performance and report departmental patient satisfaction scores .
- Systematic, formal online developmental materials for ongoing education.
4. Foster a culture of service
The team members most effective in their support service roles clearly understand their role in the healing process. They recognize and embrace their responsibilities in ensuring patient satisfaction, and they welcome the clearly defined expectations by which they are both held accountable and receive positive recognition. In "laying the groundwork" for a service-centric culture, one must establish several elements to ensure success:
- Define a process to recruit individuals who possess the desired qualities of a "service-focused" team member;
- Implement a formal candidate "self-selection" process to ensure that each applicant fully understands departmental service expectations and "buys in" prior to applying; and
- Develop a formal reward and recognition program that publically recognizes team members for performance that makes a difference in a patient's stay.
Developing systems to proactively recruit and hire the best people, reinforce key objectives through training and consistently reward team members for making a positive difference with their work will pave the way to greater patient satisfaction outcomes.
The goal: Outstanding support service results
Experience has proven that patient satisfaction outcomes are correlated to the way support service disciplines are managed. With properly-placed managers leading well-trained and properly-resourced teams, results improve, and when the appropriate systems are applied in conjunction with technology, exceptional outcomes become not only achievable, but predictable.
Bobby Floyd is the chief operating officer of HHS, a firm that has been providing support service management solutions for healthcare facilities since 1975.