3 Strategies to Help Healthcare Facilities Reduce or Repurpose FTEs

Attempting to reduce or repurpose FTEs can be a challenge. As an article posted by the American Academy of Family Physicians points out, determining the most cost-effective number of FTEs a facility needs while still maintaining the highest level of productivity can be tricky. The article suggests “comparing practices to industry benchmarks and making adjustments to the numbers, as needed” according to your facility’s unique situation.

Many healthcare facilities may be overstaffed in the name of productivity. Fortunately, you don’t have to sacrifice productivity to reduce or repurpose FTEs. Here are three strategies to help you reduce or repurpose FTEs while improving efficiency, patient satisfaction scores, and your revenue cycle.

1. Improve Healthcare Employee Retention

If your practice or hospital has more FTEs than the average for similar facilities, perhaps it is the result of high turnover. Newer employees typically take longer to complete the same tasks as veteran staff. If you can retain experienced, efficient employees, you may not need as many overall.

2. Evaluate Employee Performance

Utilize technology that can monitor employee performance for you and find out where staff efficiency may be improved. For example, technology that produces registrar report cards can help you compare the accuracy and efficiency of individual registrars and determine whether your excess number of FTEs is due to inadequate employee performance.

3. Workflow Automation

Reevaluate your facility’s workflows to determine where you might cut manual labor costs through workflow automation. Workflow automation can lessen internal workloads and enable you to reduce or repurpose FTEs.

Workflow automation helps improve healthcare employee retention and can have a direct impact on patient satisfaction scores. Healthcare employees are passionate about making a difference in the lives of patients. Workflow automation allows staff to spend less time on tasks like calling insurance companies for eligibility/authorizations and calling patients with appointment reminders, and more time focused on patient care.

This reduces employee burnout and leaves employees feeling more fulfilled (and patients feeling more satisfied!), resulting in better healthcare employee retention and increased patient satisfaction scores.

Check out the following case studies to see how real hospitals were able to repurpose FTEs and improve patient satisfaction because of workflow automation:

1. Hospital repurposed 8 FTEs, eliminated 1.3 million pages per year, and reduced patient wait times by 28%.

2. Hospital grew its surgery department by 20% without an increase in FTEs, thanks to workflow automation.