Performance management is an important practice in every industry, but in healthcare it is critical because lives are at stake. When healthcare workers (doctors, nurses, or support personnel) aren’t performing at their best, it will negatively impact patients through lower quality of care, higher costs, or other undesirable results.
Unfamiliar with performance management? It’s the process of evaluating how well employees perform their job duties. But as Success Manager Dimitry Adamyan from Fluix—an automation platform for healthcare clients—explains, it’s much more than that. “Today’s performance management process goes beyond simple evaluation,” he says. “It combines technology, feedback, and collaboration to help achieve an organization’s goals.”
That technology component, especially automation, is central to modern performance management and is the focus of this article. Keep reading to see why it’s so important and what benefits it provides. You’ll also find a few example healthcare areas where automation is an easy choice.
Why is automating performance management in healthcare important?
“The healthcare system has been significantly strained by the pandemic,” says Adamyan. “Right now, there are simply not enough providers and other key personnel to meet the needs of populations around the world.”
What’s the impact of this strain? Adamyan says there are always sacrifices when healthcare workers and resources are constrained; for instance, undesirable patient outcomes and reduced quality of care. “Essentially, the more taxed workers are, the lower overall quality of life patients can expect when seeking healthcare.”
One of the keys to relieving this stress on providers and systems is automating elements of performance management in healthcare organizations. The industry has a lot of rules and regulations that make many organizational processes like performance management burdensome and time consuming; however, automation can streamline the process.
“You can implement automation tools that eliminate paper-based documentation, help collect data, standardize assessments, and generate useful metrics,” Adamyan explains. “The more you rely on these tools for administrative concerns, the more time and effort your workforce has available to focus on patients.”
What are the benefits of automating performance management in healthcare?
Adamyan calls out a few benefits you can take advantage of through automation:
- Save time: Automating routine tasks like data collection frees up time for clinicians and support staff.
- Reduce costs: Manual, paper-based processes drain resources and create high indirect costs related to labor hours. Errors from manual processes, like data entry typos can result in major issues, such as incorrectly assessing a performance metric that’s tied to an employee’s compensation.
- Increase efficiency: Automation means less disruption for healthcare workers, meaning they can better focus on completing tasks.
- Achieve better patient outcomes: As a result of time savings, staff can cover more patients and give them more attention. In addition, automation provides the means to quickly evaluate performance metrics. This way, you can identify areas of improvement or employees that you need to terminate—either case has a positive impact on patients.
- Improve reputation: The combination of the above will reflect positively on patient perception and health outcomes.
How can you automate performance management in healthcare?
For starters, with an effective tool, you can automate any part of your performance management process that has a documentation component.
Consider care management, an industry that many of Adamyan’s clients work in. Care managers deliver care to patients at home, so there’s a lot of driving, paperwork, and other aspects that take time away from tending to patients and addressing their needs. “These workers also lose valuable time dealing with smaller issues, such as misplaced or damaged forms, unreadable notes, and the tedious task of transferring what they’ve written into electronic form.”
When it comes to performance management, the right solution can track how many cases a care manager can successfully oversee. For instance, you can set specific metrics to monitor quality of care and receive notifications when these metrics fall below a desired threshold. This allows you to take action and address any issues promptly.
Automation also digitizes paper forms and other documentation, helping care managers to use tablets or laptops instead of carrying stacks of paper. And Jotform is an ideal solution for this.
How can Jotform help you automate performance management in healthcare?
By implementing Jotform, an intuitive form builder, you can create and grant access to customized templates for patient care visits, as well as performance management tasks. Here are a few examples of the Jotform tools you can use:
- Planner templates to collect ideas related to organizational goal setting
- A employee task list template to create, assign, and track tasks for teams and individuals
- A training request approval process template to build a workflow around training requests
- Employee evaluation forms to conduct performance appraisals
Automating performance management in healthcare is simple with Jotform. It offers hundreds of prebuilt form templates to streamline your processes and support your teams’ activities across the organization. Start using a Jotform template today to enhance your workflow.
Photo by Cedric Fauntleroy
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