Support

ProFusion stands alone when it comes to decision-making dashboards. ProFusion brings the simplicity of collecting only six high-level, all inclusive indicators to the table. ProFusion will eliminate the painfully ineffective Quality Committee meetings, where “within compliance” graphs are on every PowerPoint slide every month, every meeting.

When any of the six ProFusion KPIs exceeds the benchmark, this is the red flag to take action. This is the jumpstart to begin a drill-down investigation. ProFusion assures you stop wasting limited resources on fixing things that are not broken. Your investigations will successfully culminate in an actionable-item and resolution.

On the DIALS screen below, Total Cost/ Exam is almost in the red, exceeding both the national benchmark and the internal target. ProFusion can assist you with the drill-down investigation.

Below is a WORKFLOW of the steps to be taken to investigate an outlier of TOTAL EXPENSES/EXAM. ProFusion starts with the high-level KPI. Next, we look at the two categories which comprise TOTAL EXPENSES, which is Salary and Non-Salary expenses. When Non-Salary is found to be excessive, we drill-down to the high expense sub-accounts first; e.g. contrast, and service contracts. When Salary is found to be excessive, we drill-down to agency utilization, on-call, and overtime first. If this level is acceptable, we continue to drill down into PRODUCTIVITY by individual FTEs. In some cases, the staffing patterns need to be adjusted. ProFusion can identify improper STAFF:ACTIVITY ratios and correct.

At one facility, the drill-down investigation didn’t stop until the level of individual productivity was compared to the level of patient activity on their individual shifts. It was identified that “overlapping” schedules was a waste of resources. For example, 7:00am to 3:00pm, 3:00pm to 11:00pm, and 11:00pm to 7:00am are common schedules. However, 8:00am to 4:00pm, 9:30am to 5:30pm, 11:00am to 7:00pm, 1:00pm to 9:00pm were also common schedules. During the hours of “overlapping”; especially 3:00pm to 7:00pm, the staffing exceeded the patient activity. This was also confirmed by the lower individual productivity of the technologist FTEs who worked “overlapped” schedules.

When asked about the “overlapping” schedules, the answers reflected a benefit for the technologist, which cost the organization. Although a long public commute, small children, city traffic, single-moms, and second jobs are all real concerns for many employees, they should not be reasons to justify excessive spending in healthcare.

Transparency and stakeholder buy-in is critical. The information found during the drill-down investigations must be shared with the staff. For staff who question the data, detailed reports of their individual workloads can be provided to satisfy their suspicion and shock at their productivity. Not surprisingly, we have never run across a technologist who didn’t feel they were the most productive technologist in the department.

There are two positive outcomes from this. 1- Inappropriate staffing is eliminated. At this facility, a positive variance of $50K/month was delivered immediately and sustained for 20 consecutive months. 2- The extreme productivity swings from high to low performers are also eliminated. Within three to six months, the productivity levels off and technologists have equitable workloads. This delivers an increase in teamwork and morale which has a downstream benefit on patient satisfaction scores.   ProFusion consulting provides support with outcomes like these.