When making a $700 million operations investment, hospital finance administrators might seek various types of feedback from legal, medical, technical and business experts. However, more facilities and care networks are relying on patient input to help advise major decisions about operating procedures. One example of this occurred in Massachusetts, where patients like Jane Maier helped Partners HealthCare choose its new medical records platform.
"Patient advisory councils, like the one Maier belongs to, often serve as sounding boards for hospital leaders – offering advice on a range of issues," explains Healthcare Finance News. "Members are usually patients and relatives who had bad hospital experiences and want to change how things work, or who liked their stay and want to remain involved."
By considering operations investments on the patient level, care facilities can integrate the positive and negative feedback of individuals to help improve systems. Seeking advice from patients and relatives helps address concerns that might go unconsidered if management, consultants and board members are the sole decision makers. The successful implementation of a patient advisory council in Massachusetts can be replicated at many other facilities.
One of the critical areas of hospital operations is accounts receivables management. If patients are dissatisfied with the level of attention and care they receive through the billing process, it's possible that your administrators are overburdened with too many cases to manage. When hospitals outsource receivables management, they save money on human resources and allow employees greater bandwidth to deliver a high quality of service to patients.
Contact Professional Medical Services today to learn more about our suite of solutions for hospitals and care facilities. We can help your organization implement better billing and collection practices so that offices run as smoothly as possible.
