Improve labor productivity — improve your bottom line
A labor productivity analysis by the healthcare consulting team of Plante Moran can help you better forecast staffing needs compared to projected volumes so that you can manage your biggest expense – labor costs. And with better use of labor comes improved profitability.
Healthcare experience important to analysis
You will appreciate working with our healthcare consultants because they understand the healthcare industry. The team includes members with credentials like RN and MHA as well as business consultants and CPAs. They will bring hands-on experience as well as consulting experience to the process.
That experience will be important because the success of the labor productivity analysis will rely heavily on the consulting team’s ability to engage your department managers. The consultants will interview your department managers and ask them to collect data to be used in the labor analysis. The consultants will also rely on the managers for help with questions throughout the process.
Looking at all of the cost centers
The healthcare consultants will look at all of your hospital’s cost centers, from nurse administration to organizational development. They will associate hours worked with work units developing profiles for each department.
With the help of your staff, they will develop a labor productivity spreadsheet for the past year. This will be a working document that you can maintain, and it will be the keystone to your organization’s continuing efforts to better manage labor costs and employee productivity.
Benchmarking your labor productivity against national data
Our healthcare consultants create labor productivity benchmarks that will benchmark your labor use against a national database of hospitals with a similar bed size, case mix indices, and regional location. They will also benchmark your labor costs against your own five months of “best performances.”
The process can be completed in as little as eight weeks concluding with a report to your management team with suggestions on how to utilize the results to improve profitability at your hospital. Often we suggest hospitals try to meet the productivity benchmarks of their own best performances and then push for a 1 or 2 percent improvement.
Forecasting staffing needs
Our healthcare consulting team emphasizes that monitoring performance should be an ongoing process — a process that is even more important as healthcare providers struggle to match expenses with revenues.