Healthcare Staffing Shortages – How Productivity Insights Can Help Your Practice

The healthcare industry is facing an unprecedented labor shortage. A recent survey by Radiology Business reported that overall staffing levels and increased workload were the biggest challenges cited by administrators, radiologists, managers, and technologists. Other disciplines, such as pathology, anesthesiology, emergency medicine, and orthopedics face similar challenges.

Practice leaders across multiple healthcare sectors echoed these same concerns this month at ImagineSoftware’s client conference, RBMA’s inaugural tech-focused SYNC event, as well as Strategic Radiology’s membership meeting, affirming that staffing shortages make it much harder to meet turnaround times and other key metrics tied to service agreements, reimbursements and a successful healthcare revenue cycle management strategy. 

Service backlogs and physician burnout are additional concerns, both of which run the risk of compromised patient care. Adding complexity to recruiting challenges, today’s physicians are demanding higher compensation plus accommodations for work-life balance.

Understanding practice productivity is key to optimizing and retaining existing resources as well as ensuring organizational sustainability. Data-driven physician productivity reports can help your organization successfully navigate the current labor shortage and beyond. Explore the value of quality insights below:

• Monitor individual physician productivity and overall practice productivity.

• Establish performance benchmarks and set realistic expectations for turnaround times and other key metrics tied to quality and partner service level agreements.

• Better understand total labor costs.

• Compare staff (supply) to patient/exam volumes (demand) to identify potential gaps and/or opportunities to optimize productivity within your existing resource pool.

• View individual provider productivity to identify opportunities or prevent burnout.

• Create more competitive, performance-based compensation models and incentives to become more attractive to the candidate pool.

• Tools like Quinsite’s Productivity Ring mobile app, akin to a daily steps tracker, gives providers near real-time visibility into their own productivity and empowers them to adjust their workflow and track improvements.

Mountain Medical Physician Specialists offers a great example of how enhanced visibility into physician productivity empowered physicians to improve their individual performance. Using the Productivity Ring tool in Quinsite’s mobile app, the practice realized a 15% increase in average daily RVU's per physician while also achieving a more equitable spread of daily workloads across all providers. In addition to generating more revenue, expansion of existing practice capacity eliminated the urgent need for hiring another FTE (cost savings of approximately $500,000), even in the face of increased volumes. Read the case study here.

Northwest Radiology (NWR) providers also use Quinsite’s Productivity Ring to monitor their productivity throughout the workday (i.e., increase their pace to stay on target or take a short break because they are well ahead). As a result, Northwest Radiology has established realistic productivity benchmarks and has experienced an estimated 10% increase in productivity per physician. Read the case study here.

Contact us if you’d like to discuss how your practice can leverage productivity data and other insights to respond to today’s staffing challenges.

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