The other day I listened to an HCI webinar about the economy’s effect on healthcare spending. Pretty bleak stuff. It was a lot of the news we keep hearing in our interviews, but there’s nothing like hard data backed up with numbers. My favorite part of the webinar? Listening to Charlene Marietti, who really did a bang up job on the stats.
Here are some highlights
CIOs are cutting operating costs, and for are already cutting staffing. IT plans are put on hold as most CIOs (71 percent—love the numbers!) expect smaller IT budgets. Staff reductions are “likely” or ”very likely” in 47 percent of organizations. The bad news goes on—and it’s broken out by size of hospitals, too. If you’d like to know the departments most at risk, check it out--IT is up there. It also covered a few strategies to increase hospital revenue, something that can be useful for anyone. Charlene finished up with finding out what “green” initiatives are being used at hospitals, and explored the business case around them.
Tim Reiner, the senior revenue officer at 37-hospital Adventist Health System also spoke about the success of using kiosks in his hospitals. It resulted in decreased registration time, pre-printed documents, staff training, document scanning, allowed re-deployment of staff, and eliminated delays between signing and availability.
If you’d like to listen to the webinar the address is
