Leaving Gaylord

August 26, 2010

I left the Gaylord National (Penitentiary) Hotel (talk about a captive audience!) with the sense that my time at the 38th annual AHRA meeting was not only well-spent, but possibly too short. The education was first rate, providing a journalist with too many choices and not enough time to get everywhere. One of the highlights came early in the meeting when Jay Mazurowski, via a video posted on YouTube, sang “Pennies from Heaven” to Gold Award winner Penny Olivi. Jay had to miss the meeting because he was in New York providing moral support to his son who will make his Broadway debut in Billy Elliot. (Break a leg!)

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Centralizing Scheduling: Many Reasons to Overcome Barriers

August 26, 2010

Terry Duggan-Jahns, RT, and Rick Wendt, RTR

There was no shortage of reasons for centralizing outpatient imaging scheduling for four Franciscan Health System hospitals in Tacoma, Washington, within 45 miles of the flagship, 320-bed St Joseph Medical Center (SJMC). Improving efficiency, capacity, ordering consistency, and contingency planning for staffing were foremost among them. “With increasing competition and financial challenges, better centralized scheduling was not only a good idea, it was necessary,” Terry Duggan-Jahns, RT, manager of diagnostic imaging, SJMC, told attendees.

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Where Angels Fear to Tread: A Checklist to Detect and Prevent Critical Errors

August 26, 2010

The old adage small children, small problems, big children, big problems comes to mind when considering the tremendous challenge facing Max Grady, director of inpatient operations, Florida Hospital, who oversees clinical operations at seven hospitals, five hospital-based outpatient imaging centers, four freestanding outpatient imaging centers, and three PET centers performing nearly a million exams per year, with all modality managers reporting into him. Hats off to Grady, who designed and implemented a safety checklist that technologists are required to complete for each examination, designed to eliminate or hold techs accountable for critical errors.

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8 Key Drivers of Employee Engagement

August 25, 2010

William R. Johnson, MBA, CRA

Managers, be advised: Work to increase satisfaction rather than engagement among employees at your peril. Why? You could end up retaining a disengaged employee who is quite satisfied with their position and happy to stick around to poison your culture by influencing the 52% of your workforce that is neither engaged nor disengaged. That was the advice of William R. Johnson, MBA, CRA, director of diagnostic services, Summa Wadsworth-Rittman Hospital, Wadsworth, Ohio, who spoke on Interviewing, Recruitment, and Retention during the Leadership Institute Basic Management Skills program on Wednesday morning. Johnson says that engaged employees take fewer sick days, have higher job satisfaction, are more satisfied with their personal life, and help attract top talent. Companies with engaged workforces across all industries earn 13% greater returns over the past five years.

“Engagement, in contrast to job satisfaction, is about passion and commitment, the willingness to invest oneself and expend ones discretionary effort to help the employer succeed,” Johnson says. Engagement is measured by the things an employee does that they are not required to do to keep their job, like stocking the linen closet between patients. “Satisfaction comes from engagement. If all you do is try to please people that won’t engage people. “We want to focus on engagement.”

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Planning a Kaizen Event?

August 24, 2010

Robert White, MBA

Lean is a production process that considers the use of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful and a target for elimination (Wikipedia), and a kaizen event is a fast-acting process of implementing change. At Portsmouth Regional Hospital, a team that included members of the radiology department, centralized scheduling, a floor nurse, and the COO entered a room with the goal of improving customer satisfaction and emerged five days later with a plan to implement 8 different Kaizen events that resulted in savings of $350,000 and soaring customer and employee satisfaction scores. Robert White, MBA, and Elizabeth Vierra, Portsmouth Regional Hospital, Portsmouth, NH, described the process in the session “How LEAN Methodology Can Improve Customer and Employee Satisfaction.”

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Outlook Sunny, 3 Models to Watch

August 24, 2010

Hospital outpatient imaging departments have definitely taken it on the chin in 2010 after weathering the downturn fairly well, reports Shay Pratt, The Advisory Board, in his talk on The Future of Imaging Payment. According to members surveyed, median growth dropped from 6% in 2008 and 2009 to 4.5% in the first quarter of 2010, with bad debt as a percentage of revenue up to 6.3%, a number Pratt likes to see below 5%. Most member hospitals attributed the volatility to unemployment.

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9 Clues That Your Market is Price Sensitive

August 23, 2010

In a wide-ranging talk in which he reviewed pricing trends impacting the current imaging landscape as best as possible considering the many uncertainties, Shay Pratt, principle, The Advisory Board, reassured hospital radiology administrators that fee-for-service will not disappear (immediately) and hospitals are likely to enjoy a pricing advantage in the outpatient market (at least for the time being). In other words, there is no sign that the ax used to reduce imaging reimbursement in the freestanding market will be sharpened next on hospital outpatient imaging. However, there are some significant competitive threats.

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4 Ways Business Plans to Bend the Health Care Cost Curve

August 23, 2010

Helen Darling

For the unvarnished view of the state of health care in America, there is no better place to turn than the National Business Group on Health (NBGH), which represents 300 mostly large employers, including 63 of the Fortune 100. The groups members provide health care coverage to more than 50 million US workers, retirees, and their families. The group’s president, Helen Darling, did the math for AHRA attendees during her keynote and it clearly does not add up.

“For a famly of 4, it costs over $18,000 in health care,” she says. “Median income is up to or below $42,000. At the rate we are going with wages flat or declining and health care increasing at 6% to 7% annually, there will come a day when someone walks through the door and they would get more in health care than they would in wages. The gap is actually shrinking.”

Employers are acting now to do what health care reform couldn’t: bend the cost curve.

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People Were Talking About

August 23, 2010

Stewart Bushong, ScD, and Sharon Fitzgerald, ImagingBiz

Sporting the best mustache in the room, Stewart Bushong, ScD, professor of radiologic science at Baylor College of Medicine, is here to help attendees implement the Image Gently protocols in their departments. He’ll be presenting all week. He also claims to work in a department with the only radiology resident—or radiologist, for that matter—in the country who wears a Super Bowl ring.

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The President’s Reception

August 23, 2010

Roland and Sandy Rhynus

Some attendees spent the day considering patient safety, automated coding, and collective bargaining. Others braved the humidity and the 90º-plus temperatures to stroll the Bermuda grass at the Potomac Ridge Golf Course for the 11th annual AHRA Golf Classic. But at 6:30 pm, all gathered at the President’s Reception, sponsored by Agfa Healthcare, to greet old friends and make new ones.

Debra Lopez, CRA, outgoing president of the AHRA, calls her year in office a labor of love, and reminisced about her first AHRA meeting more than 20 years ago, coincidentally also held in Washington, DC.

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Epicenter of the Health Care Quake

August 23, 2010

Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center

Two days after the news that a major earthquake is at least 60 years overdue on the San Andreas Fault in California, I leaped at the chance to get out of the frying pan and into the fire, Washington, DC, or near enough, across the Potomac at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, site of the annual meeting of the AHRA, the Association of Medical Imaging Management.

Hundreds of hospital radiology administrators began gathering this weekend for five days of education, networking, and exhibits. As the people who bear the responsibility for the hospital radiology patient experience, they carry a heavy load indeed. Wherever health care reform leads hospitals in the near future and beyond, they will not get there without the leadership of the nation’s radiology administrators.

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