Determine Staffing
Levels in Patient Access
"Patient access" refers to the process by which patients make use of health-care resources. Whether in a hospital or in a private practice, the patient-access process includes patient scheduling, insurance verification, registration, financial counseling and insurance company notification of the patient's visit. Because so many different functions fall under the patient-access umbrella, determining the appropriate staffing levels can be challenging-but not impossible.
Instructions
Front-Line Staff
1. Calculate the minimum number of required staff to "run the business." Some areas will require a dedicated staff person irrespective of patient volume (for example, a radiology room at third shift in a hospital).
2. Perform a time study to determine, by service location, how long it takes a staff member to completely attend to a single patient.
3. Project patient volumes by hour for each service location. Every location that has more patients per hour than a single staff member can address should have staffing adequate to process all the patients seen at that time. For example, a mammography office with front-desk staff who can handle 20 patients per hour will need three staff members if 60 patients per hour are present for service.
4. Factor for downtime-staff lunches, breaks or in-services. A pool of part-time relief staff may help reduce the need for full-time coverage simply to help cover a few busy hours.
Back Office Staff
5. Calculate the basic unit of service for each area of patient access in the back office. The UOS is the basic measure of how long it takes a person to take care of a single patient account. For example, on average, an inpatient verification specialist might take 12 minutes per account. For each area (scheduling, verification, pre-arrival services, pre-procedure planning), determine how long a staff member takes to complete an average patient account.
6. Use the UOS rate to determine how efficient the current staffing level is. For example, if it takes 10 verification specialists 15 minutes per account and they work eight hours a day, the verifiers should be able to complete 160 accounts per week. If there are only 120 accounts added each week, then the staff are operating at 75 percent efficiency and as many as two positions could be eliminated.
7. Project future needs. If the health organization believes it will see a 5 percent increase in admissions for the next fiscal year, then multiply out current volume with the new increase to determine whether current staffing levels support the expected need. For example, if 10 schedulers can schedule 1,000 patients per week at 100 percent efficiency, then a 5 percent increase in volumes means that an additional half-time scheduler will be needed to maintain efficiency without incurring a scheduling backlog.
Tags: patients hour, staff member, current staffing, Determine Staffing, Determine Staffing Levels, each area
