LifeWings Offers New Tool to Help Hospitals Wipe Out Wasteful Meetings
Collierville, TN (PRWEB) June 25, 2015 -- With the significant changes in health care reimbursement models, hospitals that want to survive in the next decade have to rigorously audit all of their explicit and undetected expenses. One frequently overlooked area of waste in health care is the time leaders and staff spend in meetings. David Shore, the former dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, extensively studied health care meetings and revealed that meeting time is largely wasted time. He stated that health care management and leadership spend as much as 5.5 hours a day in meetings, representing the single largest expenditure of time for those highly compensated individuals. His research estimates that on average, it costs a hospital $1,400 to hold a one-hour meeting. As Mr. Shore stated, "There is no bigger waster of organizational resources."
The savings that could be captured by having fewer, shorter, and more productive meetings is staggering as it is estimated that the average hospital spends $1.7 million per year on meetings and alarmingly, eighty-six percent of health care leaders surveyed said their meetings are a waste of time.
Steve Harden, CEO of LifeWings, a leader in patient safety improvement programs, has years of experience viewing this waste and facilitating improvements at more than 150 hospitals. Mr. Harden stated that, “Health care leaders we’ve worked with know that meetings represent a slow and steady drain on critical resources. They also know the potential cascading effect of saving those resources: more time for major safety and financial improvements. This simple checklist will give them an easy way to make a big impact quickly.”
The Standardized Supervisory Meeting Model Checklist provides a simple way for managers to make sure they view meetings for what they are—an important, expensive activity that can make a significant difference in the success of their organizations. The checklist includes brief questions on the agenda, meeting facilitator, work plan, and potential barriers. The checklist is available free here.
About LifeWings
LifeWings Partners, LLC is a team of physicians, nurses, Toyota-trained Lean experts, health risk managers, astronauts, military surgeons, and flight crews. The team was the first in the U.S. to study the best practices of organizations with high reliability, and successfully adapt their strategies for use in health care. They have distilled the methodology used in commercial aviation, military aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, and cutting-edge manufacturing to help health care organizations create safe, efficient, high-quality hospitals and clinics.
Stephen Harden, Lifewings Partners, LLC, http://www.saferpatients.com, +1 9016517094, [email protected]
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