Operating Performance Posts

News From Our Operations and Management Practice

Monday, March 19th, 2012

Our Operations and Management practice team has been undergoing some changes. For the past nine years, the practice has been successfully run by Richard Parsons. Rich always said he would retire when he had solved the cost/quality paradox in health care. However, Rich discovered that retirement found him before he attained that career capping goal.

David Kim

David Kim, Director of Management and Operations Consulting

The Operations and Management practice that Rich led will now be headed up by David Kim, who was a manager on Rich’s team. David has proven that he will be very capable of leading the practice team to help our clients attain ambitious results, often under challenging circumstances. David has twenty years of experience in the industry having held management and director-level positions at Kaiser, Catholic Healthcare West, Texas Health Resources, APM, CapGemini and Ernst & Young. (more…)

Putting Laboratory Under the Microscope

Saturday, January 22nd, 2011

RICH PARSONS, Principal Director of Management & Operations Consulting

HFS Consultants has developed a tool that can quickly evaluate operating performance in any hospital department. We can compare your hospital’s cost performance to virtually every other hospital in the state of California.

Using the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) Annual Financial Disclosure Reports, we have developed a method to determine productivity and cost performance per unit of service. In this article we will put the spotlight on clinical laboratory. Every hospital has a lab, and the data shows that costs vary significantly when producing a single lab result. Labor and supplies are the basic components of cost, and in most cases, these two items make up 70% of the expense of testing. HFS did an analysis of over three hundred acute care hospital laboratories in California. We studied productivity and cost performance, and identified the operating configuration in which a lab (theoretically) makes or loses money for the hospital.

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