I would advocate for a starting point of year over year analysis comparing your local operation to yourself. External benchmarking is remarkably difficult as each EHS has different responsibility sets. If you are talking purely about employee health visits: respirator fit, onboarding, sick leave management and vaccine administration type tasking your monthly volumes would vary considerably with events like flu season so that should be baked into any productivity measurements. Understanding the time per task and adding a buffer for emergency tasking is critical to getting staffing levels right.
If you are self insured and include worker's compensation visits; more visits aka more rVUs might reflect underperformance in work comp management or an external increase in injurious work. This is critically important for budget and admin folks to understand. DART from your OSHA log, occ claims data and total WC costs are a more intuitive measure of the health of a WC program than some of the EMR derived productivity measures. I was admonished for having 1.47 or so rVUs in a quarter in a prior role because the system only counted commercial non-work comp billing towards productivity which might have been an improper measure for a WC clinic generating very substantial YoY savings and that 1.47rVU of commercial billing.
Getting the metrics right for an org will take some iterative development in my opinion given EHS interdependencies with other units (for example - HR for onboarding volumes).
Thanks,
Rob
Rob Filler, MD, MBA, MPH
We are heading into budget season and I'm wondering what other hospitals use for a productivity measure for Employee Health.
Do you have a budget/target number of visits per month or do you use an FTE/# of employees measure?
I appreciate any information related to productivity that people are willing to share.
Thanks,
Carole
Carole Domin, RDN LD CDCES MBA
Practice Administration Director for Specialty Services
(603) 225-2711 x85626
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