Today, healthcare providers need to be able to deliver exceptional patient care through cost-effective internal processes while minimizing overhead expenses and retaining key staff. Business Process Management (BPM) can help them do it.
BPM is an industry agnostic solution to monitoring, standardizing, and optimizing business processes. It’s a widespread methodology that’s perfectly suited to help healthcare facilities and operations keep up with industry growth and their patients’ needs and expectations.
BPM is a robust risk management methodology that allows large organizations to get a ‘ten thousand foot view’ of their business supported by a variety of next-generation applications. It allows the organization to take an introspective look at how things work… or don’t.
In this article, we’ll walk through the ten biggest ways BPM can transform your healthcare organization.
1. Understand your organization top to bottom
BPM methodology helps give you a comprehensive understanding of every aspect of your organization’s operations.It provides you with a framework to you get clear on key questions like:
- Are you engaged with the community you’re serving?
- Are you providing them with the services they need?
- What feedback are you getting from your patients and clients?
- Are the tools you have in place the best solutions for your business’s processes and operations?
- Is the flow of tasks and information logical and accountable throughout your organization?
- Are your intake and discharge processes as efficient as possible?
- Are you collecting and analyzing your data as effectively as possible?
- Where are the bottlenecks in the patient journey?
Uncovering the answers to these simple, straightforward questions through a reliable methodology can help unlock a far greater understanding of your organization’s operations.
From this foundation, you can optimize your operations to better meet the ever-changing expectations of your patients and clients.
2. Make data-backed decisions
BPM provides a framework for quickly and effectively adjusting your operations.
Once you’ve identified a process that needs changing to better meet patient demands, you can decisively adapt processes, staff levels, and services – and instantly measure the impact – using real-time, relevant data.
This empowers you to quickly and cost-effectively improve your services and track the results of every change you implement, helping to ensure you’re providing a patient experience that will have clients coming back time after time.
3. Reduce costs and increase revenue
BPM gives you a clear and intuitive view of overhead and margins, making it easier for you to understand, control, and optimize them.
This allows you to quickly and effectively improve fiscal performance through the efficient allocation of available resources, minimized waste, and getting new services to market faster.
4. Plan proactively
BPM provides you with the tools and methodology to easily and effectively monitor and measure patient demands, staff activity, and service thresholds across your entire organization.
With real-time access to all facility information and financial transaction data, you always know what’s happening.
This empowers you to see what’s coming and proactively plan for it rather than react to it. To spot roadblocks and remove them before they become major issues. To predict trends and turn obstacles into opportunities.
5. Reduce the pressure on your frontline staff
BPM allows you to access up-to-the-minute reports and incorporate thresholds and alerts into daily tasks. This will not only help take the pressure off your frontline staff, but also improve service times for your patients.
6. Provide a consistent patient experience
Your patients and clients want to know they’ll receive quality treatment and services every time they visit your organization.
BPM allows you to easily monitor staff adherence to new initiatives and then quickly implement changes to help improve it.
It also allows you to measure the real-time impact of changes you make to your services on client satisfaction, helping you meet patient needs as effectively as possible.
Provide a first-class patient experience and your clients are bound to share their experiences with their family and friends. This ‘word of mouth' referral will improve your facility’s reputation in the community.
7. Improve compliance and security
BPM helps you roll out structured and proven processes across your organization as effectively as possible, ensuring the safety and security of your staff and patients. It also makes it easy for these processes to be documented, reportable, and available for review by certifying bodies.
This not only ensures your daily operations run as smoothly and safely as possible, but that you can easily assure your patients, certifiers, and partners that you’re proactively managing your security and compliance.
8. Improve the patient experience
By giving you a clear understanding of every facet of your business, BPM empowers you to meet the needs of your patients and clients as effectively as possible.
BPM provides you with all the tools you need to adopt a client-centric approach to planning your services and core methodologies, ensuring you address their unique needs every step of the way.
It also empowers you to easily provide a hybrid customer experience that makes the experience as stress-free, efficient as possible, and on your patient’s terms through technology like queue management systems and appointment scheduling software.
9. Make data-blacked decisions
Once your patient flow is fully understood, documented, and aligned directly to the services you offer, your organization will be empowered to execute new initiatives backed by data.
The more you know about how you do businesses, the more effective your improvements will be. And access to real-time data will then help you measure the impact new initiatives have on both patient and staff satisfaction.
10. Seamlessly gather the right data
Between giving patients a warm welcome, connecting them with the right service, and gathering co-payment and insurance coverage information, your frontline staff have a lot on their plates.
An effective BPM system streamlines this entire process, helping staff seamlessly collect the right data and pass all relevant information to the practitioner and staff.
This reduces your frontline staff’s workload and helps provide as smooth as possible service to patients and clients.
The Final Word
Let’s face it – healthcare providers don’t have a reputation for being on the cutting edge of technology.
Embracing an effective Business Process Management solution using Q-Flow can help you understand and optimize your organization’s entire operations, improve the patient and staff experience, and ultimately get an advantage over your competition.
