Hospital Operation Management: Improving Your Hospital’s Efficiency

When patients step through a hospital’s doors, they are there to receive care, but they don’t know how many operations are happening behind the scenes — hospitals are complex ecosystems. 

Hospital operation management refers to the planning, organization, and coordination of day-to-day activities that impact patient care and organizational goals. In simple terms, these are the daily activities that keep hospitals operating efficiently and smoothly.

Typically, hospital operation management tasks are broken into three categories:

• Administrative: These tasks include scheduling appointments, managing patient records, and handling billing and insurance.
• Financial: Financial tasks may range from budgeting and cost control to revenue cycle management. 
• Legal: Examples of legal tasks include following up with providers to update their licensing and ensure they participate in continuing education.

Critical Aspects of Hospital Operation Management

Now that you have a general understanding of the role of hospital operation management, let’s dive into its essential function within hospital settings.

Quality Assurance

According to the National Library of Medicine, quality assurance in healthcare “refers to the administration of systems design, policies, and processes that minimize, if not eliminate, harm while optimizing patient care and outcomes.” 

To assure quality, hospitals must collect constant data and alter processes to provide optimal patient care and an organized workplace environment. Quality assurance is essential to a hospital’s operation management because it helps achieve consistent, high-level care with minimal morbidity, mortality, disease, and discomfort.

Care Coordination

Another important aspect of hospital operation management is care coordination, which involves organizing patient care activities and sharing information with all participants involved in a patient’s care. This includes sharing a patient’s needs and preferences ahead of time and ensuring the right people are informed. Care coordination aims to provide safer and more effective patient care.

Medical Review

Medical review, the collection of information and clinical review of medical records by physician advisors or a peer review team, is another major part of operations management in hospitals. The goal of medical review is to ensure payment is made only for services that meet coverage, coding, and medical necessity requirements. Most hospital’s medical review policies and processes are influenced by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). 

Compliance Programs

An additional key factor tied into operations management in hospitals is establishing effective compliance programs to comply with state and federal regulatory obligations, including:

• Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
• Anti-Kickback Statute and Stark Law
• Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act (PSQIA)
• The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act
• Affordable Care Act (ACA)

These are just a few of the many regulations that hospitals and healthcare facilities must always comply with. The goal of compliance programs is to help hospitals seamlessly meet and exceed these regulations and laws.

4 Ways Cox Prosight Can Help You Streamline Your Hospital’s Operation Management

Operation management in hospitals can be complex and challenging, but there are many tools on the market designed to help you streamline processes, reduce manual errors, and save time. Cox Prosight is an RTLS platform that’s designed to modernize hospital operation management — here are four ways our solution can help:

1. Consolidate Asset Tracking

Due to the time spent managing and tracking medical equipment, most healthcare organizations utilize only 35-50% of their medical equipment. Not only must staff ensure they have enough working and clean equipment at all times, but they must also forecast and plan for future demand. A lack of comprehensive understanding of inventory complicates operations management and decreases positive outcomes. 

Prosight’s asset tracking solution gives hospitals real-time visibility into the location, status, and utilization of all medical equipment. Our platform helps hospitals manage their equipment more efficiently via budget planning, asset utilization, and inventory level management. 

2. Improve Staff Safety

Cox Prosight enables staff safety tracking for emergent and non-emergent care. Hospital staff wear safety badges, giving them access to emergency help at the touch of a button. Security and responders can quickly respond, utilizing their real-time location status. 

From an operation management standpoint, this solution helps hospitals monitor and report for things like hand hygiene compliance. Hand hygiene monitoring helps prevent the spread of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) and is an essential metric for hospitals to measure when reporting to agencies such as Leapfrog.

3. Automate Environmental Monitoring

Hospitals have hundreds of temperature-sensitive rooms and areas containing pharmaceuticals, blood, specimens, food, and more. Prosight automates environmental monitoring, eliminating the need for time-consuming manual temperature reporting. 

Not only does this save staff time, but automated environmental monitoring ensures information is 100% accurate and immediately uploaded into automated reports. Hospitals can easily access these reports to submit them for compliance reporting.

4. Elevate the Patient Experience

Ultimately, the goal of hospital operation management is to provide the best quality care to patients. Cox Prosight helps hospitals enhance the patient experience with wayfinding and digital front door technology. 

Hospital visits can be highly stressful and difficult for patients, but with wayfinding, Prosight provides real-time indoor GPS technology so patients and visitors can easily navigate the hospital. Visitors can drop pins to bookmark important locations, such as parking spots and waiting areas.

Hospitals can leverage Cox Prosight’s digital front door capabilities to customize alerts when patients enter, exit, and navigate the hospital grounds. The solution even allows hospitals to streamline patient check-in with mobile access to registration, scheduling, documentation, and bill payment — further helping hospitals streamline care coordination. 

Partner with Cox Prosight & Unlock New Ways to Improve Your Hospital’s Operation Management 

Hospital operation management presents unique challenges;Cox Prosight is a cutting-edge RTLS solution that’s proven to improve operational efficiency. Discover why smart hospitals of tomorrow are already leveraging Prosight to save time and money, create safe workplace environments, and deliver high-quality patient care. 

If you’d like to learn more about Cox Prosight, please contact us today. A member of our team will be in touch with you to answer any questions about our platform.