Your healthcare facility, physicians, and patients all rely on the establishment of a workforce optimization strategy.
Through this planning process, it is possible to ensure you always have optimal staff numbers needed to run your facility and care for your patients.
If you fail to pay attention to the workforce needs of your healthcare system, your daily operations could grind to a halt. Once that happens, many repercussions could arise, threatening the health of your high-performance organization.
Market Consolidation
As a high-performance organization, you undoubtedly come across inviting opportunities to pick up smaller healthcare systems. But as this occurs, fragmentation of your workforce and silos can start to become a problem, leaving your patients without the care they need.
With a proper workforce optimization strategy, your teams of execs can use their full visibility of the departments to overcome this problem and make optimal staffing decisions. Through this process, they can decrease fragmentation and keep all associated healthcare systems running their best.
Journey to Value-Based Care
As your organization moves toward the value-based care model to improve your patient experiences, workforce optimization is a must. Replacing the fee-for-service model requires total alignment of all your healthcare systems for the ultimate in care coordination. You cannot do that if your workforce strategy does not keep staff numbers at optimal levels.
As you implement workforce planning, your teams can better drive innovation and manage their patients’ health needs, including population health initiatives and minimizing risks through preventative care. You will be better prepared to make the switch to a quality care model your patients deserve.
Patient Experience
When patients come to your healthcare centers, they need to know you are doing all you can to optimize their experience. They should be able to get in to see their physician in a timely manner and receive only the highest quality of care.
Unfortunately, a lack of optimization can result in not having enough workers to handle patients’ needs. When this happens, patients may start to feel dissatisfied with their experience at your clinics. They may leave negative reviews and stop providing positive word of mouth. Without a prompt resolution, they may even start looking for different providers altogether.
Data-Driven Decisions
As you develop and rely on a workforce optimization strategy, you can gather the data needed to make further management decisions. You can continually work on optimization by using the data to bring in enough workers and coordinate care across all teams, for example.
With a look at efficiency, spending, and patient experience metrics, you can dial in your staffing decisions to improve the areas that need work. Through your reliance on data-driven decisions, you can make improvements year after year and reach your goal of using the value-based care model.
Competitive Landscape
Until you make it a priority to optimize your workforce, you cannot gain a competitive edge in attracting and retaining the top talent for your healthcare system. From healthcare providers to the administrative team, job seekers are looking for somewhere where people feel satisfied with their job duties, work environment, and career trajectory.
Without optimization, workers are spread too thin to complete their job duties properly. As a result, their job satisfaction tends to decline, making your clinics unattractive places to work.
Shrinking Market Share
Your ability to capture a large share of the market also hinges on your workforce optimization strategy. Patients want to know you have their best interest in mind when they come to your clinics. This means having the right level of staff on board to provide the support expected during each and every visit.
If your patients do not feel satisfied with your care quality or other aspects of service, they will likely seek care from competing healthcare systems instead. And it won’t stop there either. Through sharing their experiences with others, those individuals could drive many more to your competitors, awarding them with the largest market share.
Don’t Delay — Make Workforce Optimization a Priority Today
When you make workforce optimization a priority, you can improve the operations of your healthcare systems and outcomes for your patients. To easily get started, reach out to our team at VISTA to learn about our complimentary Workforce Optimization Review. We can help you identify the areas in need of attention and start working toward total optimization of your workforce.
