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Prescription: office automation
Insights
Minneapolis Children's Medical Center automated its professional staff office, significantly improving efficiency. This office automation increased output by over 300% without additional staff.
Area of Science:
- Healthcare Administration
- Health Informatics
Background:
- Minneapolis Children's Medical Center (MCMC) has a large, diverse professional staff of 650 members, including physicians and allied health professionals.
- The professional staff office faced challenges managing extensive information for this large staff in a 122-bed hospital.
Purpose of the Study:
- To describe the process of selecting and implementing an office automation system.
- To demonstrate how this system streamlined operations and improved the efficiency of the professional staff office.
Main Methods:
- Established a hospital-wide user committee to identify needs and select vendors.
- Implemented a word-processing system to manage 650 professional staff profiles, each with 44 variables.
- Developed programs to automate report generation.
Main Results:
- Reduced the complexity of updating staff information from 25 separate lists to individual profile adjustments.
- Automated the generation of numerous required reports.
- Increased the professional staff office's output by over 300% without increasing personnel.
Conclusions:
- Office automation significantly enhanced the operational efficiency of the professional staff office.
- The user-driven selection process ensured the system met the specific needs of the hospital staff.
- The implemented system successfully managed large volumes of data and automated reporting, leading to substantial productivity gains.
Abstract:
The mission statement of Minneapolis Children's Medical Center reads, in part, "Mindful of the unique characteristics of children, MCMC's missions is to provide a team of health care professionals attuned to the special needs of the total child, at all ages from prenatal through adolescent, in a uniquely designed facility." Therefore an "open" professional staff, rather than a medical staff, was established consisting of physicians, dentists, and other health professionals with advanced degrees at the master's level or above, including, but not limited to, psychologists, social workers, clinical nurse specialists, chaplains, audiologists, and speech pathologists. This professional staff has grown to 650 members, extremely large for a 122-bed hospital. The professional staff office needed help in managing the volume of information associated with this large staff. To meet that need, in addition to the needs of other hospital areas, MCMC's administration made the decision to purchase office automation equipment and established a committee of hospital-wide users, rather than managerial staff, to survey their own needs, select vendors, and make the final recommendation. The word-processing system selected now maintains 650 physician profiles, each with 44 variables. Whereas prior to automation 25 separate lists needed to be updated each time a professional staff member was either added or deleted, now only individual physician profiles need to be adjusted. Programs were then designed to automate the many reports that must be done. In this paper we propose to describe this selection process and relate how the system developed has streamlined and simplified the work of the professional staff office to enable it to increase its output by over 300% without adding staff.