7 Ways to Stop Revenue Leakage in Your Hospital
Instant fix to plug the drips affecting your profitability.
Every hospital faces financial leakage in some form or the other which is a cause for losing significant revenue and profitability. You already have enough concerns on your plate ranging from competition to new trends to worry about these process and system issues too. But can you afford to ignore it?
We have studied the common revenue leak points in a hospital and here we list 7 ways to stop revenue leakage from your hospital and make the profit and loss statement look more promising than ever:
1. Get Your Inventory Systemized
We are not just referring to your main store but the sub-stores too wherever material is stored including pharmacy. A proper systematic inventory can show you a lot of trends and help you understand the usage and wastage much more clearly than the ambiguous answers your store in charge or even your operations head maybe giving you. Get the inventory from main store and sub stores automated and ask your IT team for weekly reports.
2. Get a Grip on Your Maintenance Cost
Tighten the approvals of maintenance requests and bills. Let your operations head take all approvals in writing with a reason why the maintenance is required in the first place. You will notice a considerable dip in the maintenance bills very soon. Small drip this is but a continuous one. Plugging this one will go a long way in the P&L statement.
3. Quantify Utilization Rates of Equipment
Make this one a quality indicator, not just in OT or ICU but all diagnostic departments too. A lot of your investment has gone into those state-of-the-art equipment. The HODs of the respective departments may have followed up a lot with you to get your approval to buy the equipment, now make them accountable for the ROI too. Make reports on utilizations rates of heavy equipment mandatory. Target 80% utilization and make your department heads work towards it.
4. Focus on Moving Non-Moving Items
Once your hospital is automated with a simple click of a button you can now know all about your inventory movement. Make sure to get a Non-Moving items report; not just weekly but monthly and also an accumulated report like last 3 months or last 6 months. Get the movement of each item analyzed and take a call on it. It either needs to move within the hospital or needs to move out of the hospital inventory.
5. Say Bye to the Non-Performers
Non-Performers be it material, machinery or men need to be identified, given a chance to perform and in cases of failures be replaced. No one comes to your hospital to work for free; you have to pay a salary and that salary is money. Invest it on the right manpower and resource. Get your HR to design your appraisal system in such a way that you are able to identify your contributors and non-contributors correctly. Be ready to take some harsh decisions once in a while.
6. Put a Cork on Pilferage in all Forms
The message should sound loud and clear in your hospital – taking anything from the hospital for personal use is not allowed, be it a paper clip or whole pad of cotton gauss. Pilferages don’t just happen in the form of stealing money from finances or material from stores in a hospital, it happens in much smaller forms too. The cumulative impact of this may in reality be much more than the financial or material pilferage. Tighten your security to cut pilferages. Your infrastructure should have the least number of outlets and your operations team should be trained extensively. Nothing works like the sense of ownership added with a healthy amount of accountability.
7. Set Tight Limits to Your Credit Giving Policy
Though hospitals work on a pay and take service model, credit giving does become inevitable at times especially with patients from insurance, TPA and government schemes forming a large chunk of your patient inflow. Also while catering to patients from different strata’s of the society credit becomes unavoidable. Formulate a watertight policy about credit and make sure your operations team follows it to the T. A deviation from this policy can cost a lot over a period of time.
Taking all these measures can be quite simple when your hospital is automated. A single screen at the end of the day can give you all the insights you need to stop leakage and manage your operations smarter. To know more, click here.