Comparing Where You Are to Where You Want to Be
Benchmarking - Inpatient transportation managers have a high level of interest in comparing their performance metrics to others to determine how they are doing.
- How does my department's productivity stack up?
- Do others deliver patients within 25 minutes as I am expected to do?
People want to compare things like volume of transports per month, number of FTEs, average trip duration, number of transports per transporter/hour.
However, differences in hospital size and configuration, the variety of subjects that are transported, the location and availability of transport equipment, the relationship between trip volumes and staffing levels, discharge processes, and nursing staff levels will all affect the metrics to be compared, making it difficult to draw good conclusions.
Internal Benchmarking A better approach to benchmarking is to set specific standards within your own organization against which you can measure your performance. These include such measures as dispatch variance, on-time patient delivery, trip duration variance and employee productivity.
Industrial Engineering Studies If your Patient Transportation Software is not built on industrial engineering principles or you do not use software, you can establish studies to identify a "standard trip duration" between all nursing units, diagnostic departments, clinical areas, the transport office, equipment pick-up and return areas, and discharge locations. These time studies are modified by such things as:
- Equipment drag factors
- Patient prep at the unit
- Patient loading and unloading
- Elevator access times
When each trip has a standard trip duration, then a suggested dispatch time can be calculated to deliver a patient to any destination at the scheduled appointment time, or an appointment time can be created for unscheduled trips based on a set dispatch time.
With this in place you are now able to make some key measurements, dispatch variance, trip duration variance, on time trip completion, employee productivity and staffing requirements.
The inability to dispatch on time is almost always caused by insufficient staff to handle the volume of trips. Some of that deficiency can be made up if employees are highly productive, or made worse if productivity is low. Productivity can only be determined by comparing actual performance against internal standards.
Get a free analysis of the staffing patterns for your specific situation.
