What are the most critical operational metrics you track regularly?
The most critical metrics that we have found in our organization to be beneficial would be our bed turnaround times. This is how long it takes us to respond and clean a room and get it ready for the next patient’s arrival. It’s our patient satisfaction scores for both food and EVS. And the last KPI is of course, financials. And we track that for food on a cost per meal and a cost per patient day. And on environmental services, we look at the cost per cleanable square footage.
So, is it just reporting?
It’s not just reporting. It’s utilizing the data that comes from all of these technologies and systems to make more data-informed decisions and to move quicker and be more proactive in our decision-making process. You’ve got to first gather the data, cleanse the data, and then turn it into something actionable, and that’s letting the data tell the story. And the challenging time that we have in our healthcare systems with absorbent costs, either through labor or through inflationary factors for supplies, eroding hospital margins, it’s important that we do more with less.
How are predictive analytics helping hospital leaders?
Predictive analytics is extremely important. It lets us know of not only where the business is, but where it’s going. That allows us to be proactive in our scheduling, our ordering, and the running of the business so that we’re not looking in the rearview mirror and we’re not reactionary, but we’re doing it intentionally ahead of the events. We use a variety of tools and systems. The one that comes to mind first is our TaskUp system, and that is a labor management or a task management system. It allows us to load our duty list for our housekeepers into an iPad. The housekeepers go about the day and check off each room and each duty as it’s clean and done. If they fall behind, it gives us alerts to let us know that there’s someone that’s falling behind schedule, and we can reallocate some of the workforce to catch them up and supplement that to make sure it gets done.