Medical efficiency gets a lot of press, especially with the debate about NHS funding. But why is efficiency so uniquely important in the world of healthcare? Whether you’re a surgery, care home or hospital, efficiency can mean not only the difference between a successful, healthy business but also people’s lives and wellbeing. Here are the four types of efficiency in healthcare and why each one matters.
Process
An efficient process means having the right infrastructure to reduce friction between departments and actions. For example, a surgery with an efficient process might be one that has a seamless electronic check-in system that alerts the doctor as soon as the patient arrives, without needing the patient to go to the reception and take additional time.
Efficient processes mean that the maximum amount of people are cared for. Nowadays, healthcare processes are measured with technology that can produce a continuous stream of data that allow the managers of the healthcare agency to identify potential bottlenecks and improve them whenever possible.
Technology
Technology is an essential part of the healthcare industry, but as it evolves so quickly, it can be challenging to find a balance between expense and performance. Often, the efficiency of technology links back to the efficiency of processes.
A good example of this is with diagnostics — investing in a good diagnostic machine can speed up diagnostics and reduce type 1 or type 2 errors (which can cause inefficiencies and negative effects on wellbeing), resulting in a faster consultation that allows more people to be attended to throughout the day. To work out if a technology upgrade is economical, you need to have some idea of how much time it saves and whether it has other effects that can improve efficiency (like reducing errors).
People
Having a good, strong workforce can be the difference between an efficient operation that helps to ensure a community is healthy, and an operation that frustrates a community and delivers very low margins. Efficient people provide better quality services in a timeframe that leads to lower long-term costs. Analysing worker efficiency is again made easier with tech, especially ones that engage with both staff and clients to attempt to weed out areas of inefficiency and poor levels of satisfaction. Collaboratively having a look at data and infrastructural patterns can lead to constant improvements and high motivation, which in turn, increases the efficiency of your people.
Solutions
Efficiently implementing solutions means that your clinic, care home or surgery is consistently making the call to implement the right solution in the right place, at the right time, for the right result. This relies on the culture of the organisation, its people and any training programmes they might undertake. Ensuring that everybody is up to date with the latest developments in their field is a great way to increase the efficiency of solutions implementation — as is making sure that the infrastructure is reliable and efficient. In modern practices, this has a lot to do with managing tech downtime, ensuring that everything is well maintained, and in general, being attentive and hands-on.
