Obviously, your health care background is important in providing some insight into today's health care industry, its problems and opportunities.
I've worked mainly with larger facilities in metropolitan areas, where the problem is diversification as well as identifying specific needs for care. Obviously, as our population grows older, more managed care is needed. But, for regular care, we need to departmentalize and specialize.
Would you explain what you mean by those terms?
To begin with, we need to provide different kinds of services. Services for the acutely ill, the chronically ill, ambulatory patients, after-surgical care, and even provide assistance with after-care in the home. Each of these departments requires its own supervisory staff and nursing and attendants, as well as doctors. We have always tried to avoid staffing that is the jack-of-all-trades, and master of none. There is more to managing a health care facility than merely treating patients, of course. That means, we need to develop certain goals and strategies, which include financial situations that permit us to be profitable, if at all possible, or at least not turn into a red-ink bleeding organization.
How do you develop goals and strategies? And, who does the developing?
We certainly don't just set up figures and expect to match them. More importantly, we need to make sure everyone is on board, and knows what we expect- in terms of performance. On a regular basis we pass out a Health Care Newsletter, which goes to everyone on staff. This shows how well we've performed, how many patients were admitted, treated, and released. We cover overhead and other costs, and project a quarterly income figure. We also have an agreement that if we meet or surpass our quarterly goals, we pay bonuses to ALL employees- not merely to the professional staff. Of course, a key ingredient here is that we also ask the various supervisors to h...