Productivity Management 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…)

Spotlight on Med/Surg

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

Rich Parsons, Vice President / Principal

Director of Management and Operations Consulting

While it can be argued, we believe that the Medical Surgical (Med/Surg) units are the most important department in an acute care hospital. They house the majority of patients, are the most operationally intensive, and generally provide the most revenue. It is on the Med/Surg units that inpatients generally form their patient satisfaction opinions, which gives a hospital its reputation for quality care. (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.

(more…)

Hardwiring Excellence in Your Next Strategic Planning Retreat

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

Building a strategic plan on a foundation of your annual board retreat is not a new concept, but Hazel Hawkins Memorial Hospital (HHMH), the hospital of the San Benito Healthcare District, conducted its 2009 retreat with some innovative twists. The Hospital, working with HFS, crafted a retreat around the principles articulated by Quint Studer in his book Hardwiring Excellence. (more…)

Benchmarking and Productivity

Saturday, June 12th, 2010

Rich Parsons, Principal, Director of Management & Operations Consulting

HFS CONSULTANTS has developed an innovative method for understanding productivity in California hospitals.  With it we are able to measure productive hours per unit of service in any department for all hospitals in the State. Our source data comes from the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) Annual Financial Disclosure Reports. OSHPD is one of 13 departments within the California Health and Human Services Agency. (more…)