Performance improvement
“Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul”—Mark Twain
At A Glance
- Credentialing and privileging
- Clinical regulatory compliance
- Medical staff operations
- Outsourcing solution for hospital medical staff operations
Overview
Most hospitals need to improve cost performance by 20% over the next several years in order to maintain margin in the face of reimbursement reductions. Despite large and often expensive efforts to reduce cost and improve quality, there’s still considerable room for better performance.
Our approach
At The Greeley Company, we deal directly with the two areas most likely to create obstacles to cost reduction and quality improvement: process complication and physician behavior. Specifically, we simplify processes constrained by seemingly intractable regulatory requirements, and we resolve issues related to physician behavior. We reduce variation, improve quality, and increase patient and clinician satisfaction at the same time that we create cost savings and process efficiency.
On a broader level, we’re able to deal with structural and process issues affecting multiple hospitals within the same health system, creating efficiencies that benefit the entire organization.
Our perspective
In the past decade hospitals have reengineered virtually every major clinical process. They’ve implemented electronic medical records and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to make processes work more efficiently. Despite these improvements, we find that many hospitals have yet to address the root causes of remaining inefficiencies—particularly when the root causes are found in misinterpreted regulations or medical staff politics.
Our services
Many of The Greeley Company’s services result in measurable performance improvement. Client outcomes include some combination of improvement in revenue, efficiency, patient flow, and staff satisfaction. Most clients experience meaningful improvements in a matter of months.
Here are some common examples of performance improvement outcomes that The Greeley Company’s clients experience:
Increased revenue:
- Improved patient flow (discharges/time)
- Improved emergency department revenue performance
- Reduced turnaround time for credentialing/privileging
- Improved performance on risk-based contracts
Reduced cost:
- Reduced cost of clinical regulatory compliance
- Reduced cost of accreditation
- Simplified clinical documentation
- Reduced cost of medical staff credentialing/privileging
- Reduced cost of medical staff administration
Improved quality and patient/clinician satisfaction:
- Reduced “red tape” in clinical operations
- Simplified clinical administrative processes
- Improved patient safety and life safety
- Improved physician relations
While all of The Greeley Company’s services produce performance improvement, the services listed below help clients to achieve significant results and optimal use of capital and resources. Contact us to learn more about how we can help you improve the performance of your organization.
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Credentialing and privileging
The Greeley Company’s services are designed to reduce the turnaround time and cost of the credentialing and privileging function, as well as improve its performance. Our proven solutions can actually improve hospital revenue by reducing the time that physicians must spend generating it. Our solutions eliminate process bottlenecks associated with variation in volume, and our reliable OPPE/FPPE processes reduce risk. In fact, we have ways to guarantee performance regardless of volume.
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Clinical regulatory compliance
The Greeley Company firmly believes that there is no conflict between clinical regulatory compliance, high clinical quality, and excellent cost performance. Our proven solutions reduce the day-to-day costs of accreditation and clinical regulatory compliance. Furthermore, our solutions reduce or eliminate clinical compliance risk associated with the hospital’s response to unforeseen events. The Greeley Company’s proven solutions resolve the core issues that create compliance problems and cause clinician dissatisfaction, eliminating burdensome policies and procedures while refocusing attention on high-quality patient care.
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Medical staff operations
Peer review
The peer review process is an essential element of clinical quality management, and we wrote the book on the topic—literally. Peer review can be efficient and without bias, regardless of hospital size or type. We have reduced the cost and improved the quality of peer review at hundreds of hospitals. The Greeley Company combines internal and external peer review approaches to create a process tailored to the needs of any facility, from the smallest critical access hospital to the largest health system, and from urban safety net to academic medical center.
Medical staff governance
Medical staff governance is an area full of opportunities for performance improvement and reduction of medical staff discontent. New delivery models, including ACOs and medical homes as well as new volumes of employed and contracted physicians, create the need to revisit the way in which the medical staff governs itself. Many of our clients are finding that their bylaws and leadership structures no longer meet the demands of the new delivery models. In some cases, their existing medical staff model may even be noncompliant.
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Outsourcing solution for hospital medical staff operations
The Greeley Company recently launched Credence, a service that allows hospitals to outsource all elements of their medical staff services department operations. Greeley Company research demonstrates that outsourcing the medical staff services department can be an effective strategy for cost-conscious hospitals and healthcare systems anticipating or undergoing significant changes in their practitioner relationships, such as an increase in employed physicians, a growing number of advanced practice professionals, or a shift to global contracting.
Credence offers hospitals an alternative strategy for medical staff services department functions that can increase operational efficiency, accelerate revenue by more quickly integrating physicians into their organizations, reduce risk of compliance errors, and improve physician satisfaction with the way they’re treated as professionals.
To learn more about Credence, please call 888-749-3054 or email credence@greeley.com. You may also click here to download A Novel Approach for the Medical Staff Services Department, a white paper that discusses the option of outsourcing medical staff services department functions.