Bryan Olson, director of operational efficiency at Surgical Care Affiliates, a national surgical care provider with more than 130 ASCs and surgical hospitals, shares five best practices for managing staffing costs in an ASC.
1. Demonstrate the link between staffing efficiency and quality clinical care. "The teams and companies that are disciplined and efficient are also the ones that tend to have the best quality outcomes," Mr. Olson says. Staffing decisions never jeopardize clinical quality. Showing managers — and physicians — that efficiency and quality are achieved simultaneously is necessary to get the level of buy-in you need to launch a sustainable labor efficiency process.
2. Make it a team effort. Paying attention to staff costs is not necessarily second nature to everybody. Getting managers, administrators and physicians on board with the idea that managing staffing costs is important is a necessary mindset adjustment. Once people appreciate the importance of labor efficiency, they own the process in their center and will find efficiencies in staffing.
3. Establish the proper metric for your business model. Managers and administrators responsible for staffing decisions need to buy into the measurement tools you plan to use. For Surgical Care Affiliates, that measurement is productive hours paid per case or procedure performed, Mr. Olson says. Other possibilities include FTEs per patient, or total hours per case, but whatever the measurement may be, it needs to be understood and approved by those who make staffing decisions. Walking through staffing schedules and processes with managers can help determine what metrics best apply.
"By talking to managers about how they create the staff schedule based on the OR schedule each day, we were really able to determine it was more about how many hours they put toward the cases on the schedule than it was about the number of FTEs on the roster on a given day," Mr. Olson says. Finding a metric that managers believe in involves understanding how they work, he says.
4. Create measurement tools and measure often. Because caseloads shift from week to week and month to month, relying on annual budget targets for measuring staffing goals is not adequate. Mr. Olson says his company measures hours per case level at its ASCs bi-weekly. Measurement should be done frequently enough that problems can be flagged quickly and adjustments made to remedy them, he explains. Otherwise you may be addressing a set of problems that are outdated and not dealing with more immediate ones as they arise. "I don't believe monthly is frequent enough," he says.
5. Establish achievable targets. Depending on the situation of the ASC, that target can be improving efficiency gradually over time, holding steady if the center expects significant challenges ahead, or making significant improvements if performance has been lacking. But measuring without trying to meet a target is not enough. People in charge of staffing decisions need to know what they are working toward, and they should take pride hitting their targets and helping the center to succeed.
Learn more about Surgical Care Affiliates.