Effective management is key to success for any type of organization and this includes hospitals too.
A solid hospital management strategy can help:
- Provide better care for your patients.
- Improve job satisfaction among your healthcare professionals.
- Improve patient outcomes hospital-wide.
Want to learn how to manage your hospital better?
Medesk is an assistant for clinic managers, collects and presents complex statistics about the work of the clinic in a simple and understandable way, that makes it easier for the manager to make both operational and strategic decisions.
Learn more >>In this article, we’re going to give you some of the most important hospital management tips in 2024!
9 Essential Hospital Management Tips
#1. Train Your Staff for the Digital Age
In 2024, most healthcare professionals should have a solid enough understanding of technology.
At the very least, they should be able to use digital devices to access online patient records and input new data.
There are several practical ways to train your healthcare professionals to get better with technology:
- Set up IT onboarding processes. Whenever you make a new hire, have them go through several training sessions to learn how to use the right systems/tools.
- Offer annual or semi-annual training sessions and bring in external experts to teach your staff how to use specific tech or software.
- Provide an annual budget to your healthcare staff for pursuing online IT education. E.g. If they want to take a course in their free time, the hospital covers the costs.
Medesk support team holds weekly free training seminars for clinics’ employees. We are always ready for a prompt respond in a seminar’s chat.
Open the description >>#2. Use Electronic Health Records
Using EHR software helps your clinic provide the best possible patient care. Some of the benefits of such software include:
- Better care coordination. Since your patient data is automatically shared with other hospitals using EHR software, it’s easier to coordinate patient care.
- Simplified data accessibility. Electronic health records can be accessed anywhere in the world by both medical staff as well as patients.
- Improved clinic efficiency. By taking your health records online, your healthcare staff doesn’t have to waste time managing hundreds of paper forms and physical documents.
- Better patient data security. Physical records can be misplaced, lost, or destroyed. Online records, on the other hand, are as secure as it gets.
Want to learn more about how electronic records hold up to conventional paper ones? Check out our article!
#3. Provide Ongoing Training for Your Staff
Your healthcare staff should constantly be updating their knowledge and skill-set and the best way to encourage them is to provide semi-annual training sessions.
This can include bringing in external experts to the hospital to conduct the training or sending off your staff to attend different courses, conferences, and the like.
#4. Work on Your Communication Strategy
Communication problems can be a big challenge for both hospitals, as well as any other type of organization.
And this doesn’t just involve communication between doctors and patients - problems can arise between different healthcare professionals too.
So, what can you do to improve your hospital’s communication strategy?
One of the most effective communications strategies in healthcare is the SBAR Structured Communications.
According to this strategy, every conversion between healthcare staff and patients should start with:
- Situation - Who’s calling, in regards to which patient, and the reason for the call.
- Background - Concise information on the patient or their condition.
- Assessment - Assessment of the patient’s condition.
- Recommendation - Options for treatment and potential courses of action.
Want to learn more about healthcare communication strategies? Check out this article.
#5. Take Advantage of a Practice Management Solution
Practice management software (PMS) can help improve your clinic’s administrative efficiency and at the same time unlock new features for your patients.
Software like Medesk comes with essential features such as:
- Patient portal. Your patients can manage their appointments online without having to physically call the hospital.
- Reporting and analytics. You can generate automated reports on the marketing channels that work best for you, the most booked hospital services, and so on.
- Inventory management. You can keep track of the hospital’s consumable items. The software automatically writes off inventory when an item is used and sends you alerts when you need to re-stock.
- Telemedicine. PMS allows your healthcare professionals to conduct online consultations from anywhere in the world.
- Medical CRM. Finally, you can use practice management software to automatically send appointment reminders and reduce no-show rates.
Want to give practice management software a try? Head over here for a free trial!
Yes, practice management software is different from EMR. Learn the differences with our guide.
#6. Always Stay Patient-Centric
It’s easy to get caught up with all the administrative aspects of running a hospital, but at the end of the day, there’s only one thing that matters to you:
Keeping your patients healthy.
Everything your hospital does should be directed toward this goal, whether you’re hiring new staff, adopting new software, or anything else in-between.
#7. Encourage Accountability
All your healthcare professionals should have a clear idea of what their tasks and responsibilities are.
As such, if something goes wrong, it’s easy to identify who made a mistake without staff members pointing fingers at each other because there was no clear task owner.
#8. Track and Measure the Right Healthcare KPIs
The best way to understand how your hospital is performing from an organizational standpoint is to track and measure the right healthcare KPIs.
Specialists working at the clinic can enter all the information they need about the services they perform and create detailed reports on the clinic’s work. The clinic manager can receive a detailed report on the effectiveness of your clinic's business processes.
Learn more >>Some of the most important operational KPIs you can track are:
- Average hospital stay time for each treatment type. This helps understand how long, on average, each type of treatment takes and whether it holds up to industry standards.
- Medical equipment utilization. Are the machines your hospital owns used as often as they can be?
- Average patient wait time. How long does it take for a patient to see a given healthcare professional?
- Bed or room turnover. How fast are patients moving in and out of the hospital?
#9. Invest in Healthcare Marketing
If you want to drive patients to your hospital, it’s important to invest in the right type of marketing strategy.
Some tried-and-tested healthcare marketing tactics include:
- Create a modern website. In 2024, the quality of your website really plays a part in whether patients are going to pick you over another hospital. If your website is well designed and easy to navigate, you’re going to be miles ahead of your competition.
- Implement SEO best practices. More often than not, when looking for medical help, patients use Google. As such, ensuring that your website is well-optimized is essential.
- Run Google Ads. You can run ads on Google for keywords people use to look up specific health problems. E.g. you can advertise on the keyword “back pain” or “physiotherapy consultation.”
That’s just the tip of the iceberg - there’s a lot more to healthcare marketing than what we can cover here. To learn more about medical practice marketing, check out our dedicated guide.
