Just a few hours invested in training your team can yield small improvements in productivity for each employee. Over the course of a year, each person’s small improvement can add up to hundreds of hours of time saved for your entire company—time that is no longer wasted but is, instead, spent caring for patients and improving your overall business.
But if time is limited, and you cannot invest in training all of your employees at one time, how can you determine which employees have the greatest need for training, right now? How can you determine if your training efforts offered a return on your investment at the end of the year? The answer, of course, is metrics.
Determine Metrics
Before you embark on a training routine, take a step back and determine if your current delivery process actually makes sense. If you try to train your staff with a dysfunctional process, you could end up causing more errors instead of helping your team become more efficient and effective.
Once you determine that your process is logical and complete, the next step is to establish measureable goals for each employee. Setting specific goals is the key to monitoring results. Once these metrics have been determined, use your technology to measure and report each employee’s performance.
Analyze Results
With the correct workflow tools, usually a management software, you can pinpoint the overall output at each stage of order completion, from intake to billing to delivery. Managers can then look at the output and quality of work that each staff member completes on a daily basis. From that point, you can drill down further to determine how long each employee takes to complete orders or particular tasks and how many revisions are required due to errors.
Providers can easily see, throughout the order completion process, the stages at which everything flows smoothly and the stages where bottlenecks may be occurring. Managers also have the ability to see how many orders are running through the workflow with zero errors versus those that have to be sent back to other departments due to missing information or documentation. With this level of detail, managers can easily visualize the staff members who need additional training and the specific areas in which training will need to occur.
All of these metrics can be established from the beginning, and your software technology can notify managers when these metrics are not being met. These real-time warnings eliminate the need for managers to sift through mountains of data to try to figure out where problems are occurring.
Reap the Rewards
Providers have to manage the balance between their fixed resources and the need to expand to meet the growing population-based demand for HME services. This is why it is so important to rely on technology to identify areas where improvement is needed and where incremental gains in productivity can add up, over time, to sizeable change that impacts your business.
