1. Focus on staffing costs and efficiencies. As in most centers, our staffing costs represent our highest expenditure and thus our most managed areas. As a team we match staffing to volume, eliminate overtime hours, allow staff to leave early on expedited days and cross-train team members to at least one additional area of expertise. We utilize PRN nursing to allow our recovery team the ability to leave on time when surgical days run longer. Additionally, as nurse manager, my role to assist with patient care in any position allows for our patient care to flow on days when the staff has unplanned absences. By deploying these strategies we were able to reduce our salary wages and benefits as a percentage of collections to 15.36 percent in 2009 compared to 21.18 percent in 2008.
2. Added cases internally. In 2009 we recruited additional cases from our existing physician partners to produce a 140 percent increase in cases from 2008.
3. Renegotiated contracts. To maintain strength in our pricing, all contracts were negotiated to produce an average of a 5 percent increase on all managed care contracting.
4. Address implant costs and usage. We continued to work with carriers on reimbursement for implants on either a threshold basis or cost-plus. Our management team works with our surgeons to standardize the majority of our implants and disposables to one major vendor, thus allowing our pricing to decrease from a year-to-year basis and maintaining volume to the vendor allowing for greater leverage in the negotiation process. This coupled with a “no new products introduced by vendors in our ORs” policy allows management time to research, price and evaluate the implant viability prior to introduction to our surgeons. This increases efficiency by reducing interruptions to the OR team and associated vendor cost in the OR.
Contact Janet Cordovano at janet.cordovano@mooreclinic.com.
