Visual management boards have become scoreboards at Williamson Medical Center in Tennessee, allowing revenue cycle employees to see daily and monthly metrics to “play the game of hospital financial improvement,” according to a published report.
A growing number of collection agencies have used monitors and screens in their offices to display key data points as a means of motivating collectors to improve their collection rates and to share other important metrics that affect the companies’ bottom lines.
At Williamson Medical Center, the revenue cycle management department seems to have embraced the concept, referring to the data on the scoreboards as box scores and noting that “what gets measured gets managed.”
Two key factors that affect the effectiveness of the scoreboards are determining what data points are displayed and how many different data points to focus in on.
Rodney Adams, the administrator of finance at Williamson Medical Center, says the hospital’s newly installed scoreboards never show more than three data points, for example.
“If you’re asking people to focus on improving more than three metrics at a time, you’ll struggle to be successful,” he said in the report. “Managers, leaders, and staff can’t focus on eight different priorities. So, we pick metrics that are strategically important, and that ties back to strategic planning. We also pick metrics that we can measure and monitor without taking hours to pull the data.”
The boards have changed the culture at the hospital, Adams said, and have been worth the hardships that went into installing them.
“It’s something new and determining which metrics you want to measure and how you’re going to get data for those metrics is challenging. All of those are the hardest things, but once you get it up and running, it becomes fun and it becomes transformational,” he said in the report.
