John Gleason, administrative director at Berks Center for Digestive Health in Wyomissing, Pa., discusses four ways the center is working to stay competitive and successful.
1. Recruit high quality GI physicians. Mr. Gleason says a great amount of effort is put toward maintaining and recruiting a team of highly skilled GI physicians who can demonstrate high quality care. This is done at Berks Center by recruiting internally and hiring third-party recruiters.
"We have physicians who have maintained contact with their former fellowship program and have found recruits from those contacts," Mr. Gleason says. "When we do have a potential candidate, we bring them to our location to show off our facilities and staff, our community and our physicians. We also take the opportunity to share the data on the high quality care we provide and give candidates a sense of our physicians' return on their investment from a financial standpoint."
2. Demonstrate high quality care. Berks Center is able to prove to patients its focus on high quality care with the formation of its quality committees and performance improvement projects. The center also compares its performance to national benchmarks and standards as well as against the performance of other similar facilities.
"For the most part, we are able to demonstrate better performance compared to national benchmarks published by organizations, such as withdrawal times which measures the time to withdraw an endoscope from the patient during a colonoscopy," Mr. Gleason says. "Physicians examine the colon on withdrawal, and it requires a sufficient time period to do a good exam. We also look at safety statistics, such as how often patients have perforations, infections and post-polypectomy bleeds. We have very low incidence rates in these areas."
3. Monitor costs and relationships with supply vendors. Mr. Gleason says working with GPOs to get the best pricing on endoscopy supplies, bargaining with vendors and keeping costs low will ultimately help drive up case volume.
"Managing our costs and striving to get the best pricing on our equipment through GPOs has helped to keep our facility competitive because the more you drive down the costs, the more you're able to provide a service at reasonable cost to patients," he says. "One of your biggest costs is your staffing. You want to make certain you have the right mix of staff, including RNs and technicians, in your facility," he says. "If you have nurses only, you have staff members who are doing jobs that a less highly trained individual can perform, such as reprocessing scopes or even assisting the doctor in the procedure."
4. Expand your schedule to allow more patient visits. Extending hours of operation at Berks Center has allowed more patients to come in later in the day. Additional weekend hours have been made available to patients in the past to accommodate schedules, and Mr. Gleason says that is an option that will continue to be made available on occasion in the future.
"We started out with a schedule that went from approximately 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday, with the last case finishing around 3 p.m. In order to accommodate more cases, we added hours to the end of the day so that cases ended around 5 p.m.," Mr. Gleason says. "Our cases are scheduled every half hour, so this added an additional four patients per room to the schedule. An additional four procedures per room in three rooms over the course of a year adds approximately 3,000 cases to the center."
Learn more about Berks Center for Digestive Health.
1. Recruit high quality GI physicians. Mr. Gleason says a great amount of effort is put toward maintaining and recruiting a team of highly skilled GI physicians who can demonstrate high quality care. This is done at Berks Center by recruiting internally and hiring third-party recruiters.
"We have physicians who have maintained contact with their former fellowship program and have found recruits from those contacts," Mr. Gleason says. "When we do have a potential candidate, we bring them to our location to show off our facilities and staff, our community and our physicians. We also take the opportunity to share the data on the high quality care we provide and give candidates a sense of our physicians' return on their investment from a financial standpoint."
2. Demonstrate high quality care. Berks Center is able to prove to patients its focus on high quality care with the formation of its quality committees and performance improvement projects. The center also compares its performance to national benchmarks and standards as well as against the performance of other similar facilities.
"For the most part, we are able to demonstrate better performance compared to national benchmarks published by organizations, such as withdrawal times which measures the time to withdraw an endoscope from the patient during a colonoscopy," Mr. Gleason says. "Physicians examine the colon on withdrawal, and it requires a sufficient time period to do a good exam. We also look at safety statistics, such as how often patients have perforations, infections and post-polypectomy bleeds. We have very low incidence rates in these areas."
3. Monitor costs and relationships with supply vendors. Mr. Gleason says working with GPOs to get the best pricing on endoscopy supplies, bargaining with vendors and keeping costs low will ultimately help drive up case volume.
"Managing our costs and striving to get the best pricing on our equipment through GPOs has helped to keep our facility competitive because the more you drive down the costs, the more you're able to provide a service at reasonable cost to patients," he says. "One of your biggest costs is your staffing. You want to make certain you have the right mix of staff, including RNs and technicians, in your facility," he says. "If you have nurses only, you have staff members who are doing jobs that a less highly trained individual can perform, such as reprocessing scopes or even assisting the doctor in the procedure."
4. Expand your schedule to allow more patient visits. Extending hours of operation at Berks Center has allowed more patients to come in later in the day. Additional weekend hours have been made available to patients in the past to accommodate schedules, and Mr. Gleason says that is an option that will continue to be made available on occasion in the future.
"We started out with a schedule that went from approximately 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday, with the last case finishing around 3 p.m. In order to accommodate more cases, we added hours to the end of the day so that cases ended around 5 p.m.," Mr. Gleason says. "Our cases are scheduled every half hour, so this added an additional four patients per room to the schedule. An additional four procedures per room in three rooms over the course of a year adds approximately 3,000 cases to the center."
Learn more about Berks Center for Digestive Health.