How Not to Cut Health Care Costs

Some relevant mistakes stated in article:

1. Mistake 1: Cutting Back on support staff.

Productivity as a means of determining staff load.
A lot of times when higher management looks at areas and ways to cost costs it looks at productivity in each department and compares productivity to hours worked and number of employees. This could be a realistic way of determining where costs need to be cut if productivity was a true basis of how a department works and its output. There are a lot of factors that productivity reports do not take into account. Things like answering phone calls, filing, paperwork, and other administrative work.

Ex. Working as a senior tech at city hospital if I generated a work load report from our laboratory computer system it would indicate on a lot of days my productivity or testing work load is very low. What it isn’t taking into account is the daily meeting I attend, the daily issues I need to address, administrative work that must be done, that I may be creating or revising policies and procedures...

2. Mistake 3: Focusing Narrowly on procurement prices.

The best way to cut cost in this area in the long run is to invest in a reliable supply chain throughout the whole health care system. This means that all departments within the healthcare system would work with some select employees in the supply chain to make sure they are getting the best affordable quality inventory and that its standard across the board. This consolidates inventory management and procurement into a single department. It cuts down n both time and cost and ensures reliability.

3. Mistake 4: Maximizing Patient Throughput.

I think each patient deserves quality care and quality time with their Doctor. Decreases the chance of missing something important. Focus should be on standardizing care and