Hospital Cost Cutting

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Our main office is in Orlando, Florida. You can fill out our contact form or reach us at:

HPK Group, LLC
PO Box 1974
Windermere, Florida 34786-1974
Phone (407) 808-4785

Hospital Cost Cutting - The Hospital
Financial Dilemma

Hospitals today are under tremendous strain. Reimbursement levels are dropping, revenues are declining, and costs are climbing. A look at operating margins confirms the problem! The natural reaction is to cut costs and hospitals have developed extensive experience at implementing cost cutting campaigns to maintain profitability. While these efforts have made a difference, profit margins continue to shrink from year to year.

Cutting Costs brings Diminishing Returns. Pursuing a cost control strategy only gives hospital cost cutting diminishing returns. The largest cost savings are captured early on and after that additional savings are smaller and harder to come by!

How can you Improve Margins Faster? Increase the efficiency of patient processes allowing more patients to be treated. This leverages existing beds and fixed expenses to generate higher operating margins.

The HPK Group Suggests
Use Constraint Management techniques to identify and manage underlying process constraints. These techniques enable you to maximize the number of patients that can be treated with limited resources (i.e. number of beds, etc.). Next, apply Lean Healthcare techniques…

Lean Actually Means Speed!
Lean Healthcare deals with the effectiveness and efficiency of a process to reduce the variation in time that it takes to provide patient care activities. This is a perfect compliment to Six Sigma's focus on process variation. Streamlining a process with respect to time allows a more effective use of Six Sigma's process variation reduction tools.

Reduce Process Variation Through Six Sigma
Once the constraint and limitations have been identified and existing processes fine tuned with respect to time variation, Six Sigma can be brought to bear to reduce process variation that occur in: materials, equipment, methods, and conditions.

Take a Cross Functional View
Analyze patient processes from a cross-functional basis instead of from individual departmental viewpoints. Doing so creates solutions that have a greater synergy among departments and allows all units and departments to better focus on the end in mind - the expediting of patient care.

Get at the Root Cause
Branching cause/effect logic diagrams are the most effective tools that we've seen to get at the actual root causes of problems in a process. This can help to focus your Six Sigma projects - again, dramatically shortening the time that they take and substantially improving their effectiveness.

Sustain your Results
Align your policies, procedures, measurement system, and reward and recognition systems to support the changes in patient processes that you have inaugurated! Otherwise, these forces will cause your staff to revert back to their prior way of doing things.

Your first step? Contact HPK Group to schedule an informative consultation. Let us show you how we can help you improve your processes to increase your revenue. We have the ideas, we have the tools and we have the experience.