Control Your Savings Gains or Risk Losing Them
I have talked about this topic before, and I will talk about it again until everyone gets it: If you don’t control your savings gains, you will lose them. I know this to be a fact, since we see this occurring each and every quarter with our Utilizer® Dashboard clients. To their credit, our dashboard clients have tight controls in place to rapidly reverse any negative pattern that they observe in their data. Can you say the same about your healthcare organization?
For instance, we’ve seen a client who has saved $139,344 on their stents utilization in the first quarter, only to realize that their savings are being eroded in the second quarter by their physician’s high-end stent preference. That’s when they promptly schedule a meeting to re-train their physicians on their agreed upon stent protocol to stop the bleeding.
We also see clients that say they obtained a price concession on their dressing trays, custom packs, or whatever that never shows up in their data. Or, they think that their reprocessing program on oxisensors is working, only to find that it never got off the ground. Since they have our toolthey can quickly solve these problems before they become irreversible or too costly. How would you know this is happening at your healthcare organization?
I think you are getting the idea that if you don’t have a mechanism in place to ensure that the savings you are reporting are actually hitting your bottom line, all the hard work you did up front to obtain these savings is for naught! Worse yet, you could be mortally embarrassed when your boss finds out what is really happening with the savings you reported as a done deal.
You may have heard the saying “if you want to expect something to happen, then you will need to inspect to ensure it really happens”. This is the import or the message I’m trying to convey to you today: Never, ever, think that your savings are realized until you actually inspect (at least quarter) that they are still sticking or else, you will be in for a costly, awkward and distressing surprises down the road.
Filed Under: savingsblog • Utilization Management
