31.01.2024 – 14:32
Becker Project Consulting
Mountaineer (ots)
Healthcare facilities urgently need to work as efficiently and economically as possible in order to survive in the future – and this only works with digitalized processes. IT expert Frank Becker, founder and managing director of Becker Project Consulting, is at your side by advising and supporting hospitals and other healthcare facilities in the implementation of digital processes and the necessary infrastructure. Here you will find out how hospitals create effective unique selling points and why digitalization is essential for this.
Countless hospitals in Germany are currently plagued by severe fears about their survival. A shortage of skilled workers, economic problems and competition with other hospitals are already forcing many facilities to close departments and not even offer certain treatments. However, this means they fall into a vicious circle: “Hospitals that scale back operations for cost reasons will in the long term lack the budget and opportunities to offer modern and innovative treatments – the risk that they will fall victim to hospital mortality increases over time,” warns Frank Becker, Managing Director of Becker Project Consulting.
“Anyone who wants to survive as a provider of healthcare services should urgently take advantage of the opportunity now to specialize and digitize their internal processes. This is the only way to create unique selling points, relieve the burden on staff and continue to offer the best possible service,” he said Expert continues. As managing director of Becker Project Consulting, Frank Becker offers hospitals a contact person for digitalization and effective solutions for optimizing IT processes. Below he has summarized how hospitals stand out from the crowd and ensure their long-term existence.
If you don’t specialize, you won’t survive in the long run
A key problem, particularly for primary care healthcare facilities, is that they mainly attract statutory health insurance patients. With regard to the scope of services and the selection of treatments, these are largely tied to the requirements of the statutory health insurance companies and therefore bring in less money for the hospitals than private patients. If other facilities in the immediate area also offer the same range of treatments, this mass of patients is spread across several hospitals, each of which only earns a little from it.
In order to break out of this situation, it is necessary to expand your own range of services to include modern and specialized treatments that the competition does not yet offer. This is possible, for example, by specifically expanding a specific specialist area with state-of-the-art methods and technologies and equipping it with specialized personnel.
This approach has been common in industry for a long time – many companies stay afloat with general products and services and thus finance entry into a specialized, more profitable field that will give them a big breakthrough. In order for this to be successful, the digital side of the concept must by no means be neglected: only if workflows are digitized as completely as possible from the outset can expansion into a new field become profitable in the long term.
Unique selling points require digital processes
If it is not possible to offer further treatments in-house, there is the alternative of implementing these in cooperation with other facilities. For example, a hospital could work exclusively with specialized providers to guarantee its own patients priority treatment in referrals and appointments. This also creates a unique selling point that other hospitals cannot offer and that attracts new patients.
However, in order for collaboration with other institutions to work, hospitals absolutely need this to be optimally represented digitally. For example, registration and instruction processes and the transition to follow-up treatment (AHB) must be made as smooth as possible. It is also important to create processes and interfaces that enable the data protection-compliant exchange of treatment-relevant information between institutions.
Digitalization as a prerequisite for modern health services
It is therefore essential for the hospital of the future to have at least one profitable unique selling point in addition to basic care and to support this with the necessary digital infrastructure. The Hospital Future Act (KHZG), which sets out basic requirements, offers an initial outline for this. However, the legal requirements only represent an absolute minimum that hospitals must meet if they map their processes digitally. If you really want to successfully digitize your internal processes and save yourself from bankruptcy in the long term, you have to do more.
It is therefore urgently necessary to underpin existing and new processes with the most modern IT infrastructure in order to ensure that personnel and materials can be used optimally. In addition to supporting modern treatment procedures through relevant medical informatics and interfaces for referrals to specialists, the basic processes should also be taken into account. Ideally, processes necessary to keep the clinic running should require as few staff and resources as possible. For example, admission could be largely automated by having the patient enter the necessary information into an online questionnaire at home – meaning fewer employees would be needed on site to query information during admission.
Are you the operator of a healthcare facility and want to use time, staff and resources as efficiently as possible? Then contact Frank Becker now and find out in a free, non-binding initial consultation how your facility can save money through digitalization!
Press contact:
Becker Project Consulting
Represented by Frank Becker
contact(at)beckerprojectconsulting.com
Original content from: Becker Project Consulting, transmitted by news aktuell