Cassling Blog

Healthcare institutions, like other businesses, have a certain amount of operating expenses that are necessary for the continued functioning of their business. Overhead costs include, for instance, energy expenses, the costs of bureaucratic governance and documentation, advertising, supplies, and, in some cases, rent.

What patients think about their stay – from admission to treatment and actual therapy to the discharge process, dietary plans, rooms, and the communication with physicians – is reflected in quality rankings and patient satisfaction scores. Patients also influence referrers – and vice versa. Either way, negative patient satisfaction scores have a negative impact on an institution’s profitability. In addition, the public perception of a health-care provider strongly influences its standing as an employer on the job market.

Institutional inefficiencies in health care come in many shapes – whether long waiting times for treatment or test results, non-punctual arrival of inpatients, insufficient patient preparation or access to patient data, they slow down throughput and lead to unnecessary costs. Of course, the high complexity of internal processes of health-care institutions is always prone to such inefficiencies.

Health-care enterprise automatically comes with legal risks and responsibilities. Whether problems arise from unnecessary readmissions, erroneous treatment, mismanagement, or, when worse comes to worst, life-threatening mistakes, it is crucial to keep the root causes for liability or malpractice suits to an absolute minimum.

In the complex daily routines of our times, many things can go wrong. From faulty preliminary reports to incorrect documentation or unplanned system downtimes that have more severe consequences than mere idle time – there are many factors that can negatively affect patients.

The performance and the value a health system can deliver largely depend on the knowledge, skills, and motivation of those individuals responsible for delivering health services. Diagnosis plays an enormous role in high-quality health care, as it reduces the impact of diagnostic error and contributes insights and leadership to the role diagnostic tests play in improving patient outcomes and reducing medical costs.

A hospital’s quality of care is the fundament of its reputation and of referral rates. It equally builds the foundation for clinical accreditation and reimbursement, for both penalties and incentives in this regard. This is especially true for larger hospital chains. Insufficient standards, non-transparent data, or lack of training, knowledge, experience, and IT support may not only lead to unnecessary risk of liability or avoidable costs in therapy due to malpractice – your institution could eventually face losing its standing in a community committed to highest quality standards.