5 ways technology is enhancing rural healthcare efficiency

Finding ways to deliver high-quality care with limited resources is a daily reality in rural health.

Many organizations don’t see operational efficiency as a goal — it’s a necessity. And modern technologies are giving healthcare leaders new ways to achieve it with data-driven insights that can drive operational transformation.

Every resource counts for your organization. Here are five ways technology like data and modern accounting solutions can help you enhance your rural healthcare efficiency:

1. Maximizing staff

Continued labor shortages and wage demands make maximizing your current staff a priority.

Data can give you transparency into your operations to help ensure you’re making efficient use of human capital, particularly around provider utilization and productivity.

Increased visibility allows you to change your scheduling so that you’re using all the time available. It also helps you identify opportunities for your people to work at the top of their license so that you’re using nurses and administrative staff effectively rather than placing more responsibilities on your nurse practitioners or doctors.

2. Evaluating performance

Understanding the key metrics and KPIs for your services and financial performance is crucial to functioning optimally. Advanced solutions provide real-time insights into these measures, enabling you to better identify your challenges and opportunities.

For example, insights into metrics for costly units such as emergency rooms or operating rooms can help you optimize performance and maintain profitability by identifying where performance is slipping — whether in wait times, patient throughput or other essential areas — and allowing you to apply targeted strategies for improvement.

Healthcare organizations are also increasingly looking for ways to get business intelligence dashboards in the hands of their providers so that they can get immediate feedback on their performance measures.

Generating insights is valuable, but it’s crucial to understand how to use those insights to effectively drive change. For providers, performance dashboards or provider scorecards can create accountability, maintain ongoing conversations around performance and help ensure that organizational changes are implemented.

With performance dashboards, your organization can:

• Empower providers to make changes: With a real-time view of their performance, providers are no longer waiting for once-a-year feedback to make improvements. They have the data they need to understand where they need to make changes and track if those changes are effective.
• Stay aligned: Dashboards allow metrics on individual providers to roll up into leadership dashboards so that your organization is aligned on expectations and performance.

3. Streamlining financial strategy

An accurate and current view of your organization’s financial health and resources is critical in developing an effective financial plan. However, cost allocation is often a manual, offline process. CFOs commonly allocate and track funds for overhead costs by inputting them into a spreadsheet and then use those formulas to determine where the money will go.

This process doesn’t just cost your CFO time. It also means your leadership is operating off data that may be inaccurate or behind your current, real-time performance. 

A modern accounting system helps you automate that process with unified financial data and built-in formulas. And with data and analytics solutions, you can gain necessary, real-time access to metrics on revenue generation and profitability to help you stay ahead of potential financial issues.

4. Enhancing compliance

For nonprofit healthcare organizations, grants are a key source of funding.

A modern accounting system can be invaluable for effectively tracking and managing your grants. By automating cost allocation, these tools provide a clear breakdown of spending by each department. This transparency allows you to identify exactly where and how grant funds are being used, helping you streamline compliance and simplify the process of applying for future grants.  

5. Optimizing healthcare inventory management

Insight into your inventory costs and usage can help you optimize your spending.

Integrating your inventory data with your accounting system and EMR can help you avoid the costs associated with overstocking or emergency procurement. With this data, you can maintain optimal stock levels and reduce waste while still helping ensure that essential supplies are always available.

How Wipfli can help

Wipfli can help you apply the latest solutions to build a more efficient and financially sustainable organization. Our team has deep experience in navigating your industry-specific challenges and technology, positioning us to help you develop a digital strategy that helps reduce costs, improve productivity and better protect your sensitive patient data.

Ready to transform your healthcare organization? Visit our rural health provider solutions page to learn how we can help.