Reducing Waiting Times Quickly

¶ … Health Care Efficiency Efficiency is a fairly basic need in a healthcare setting. Furthermore, there are a number of critical benefits that efficiency can produce in such a setting. Overall, a more efficient health care environment -- whether it is a hospital, doctor's office, in-patient or out-patient care facility -- will result in more satisfied patients and more effective treatment. Such treatment could ultimately help to improve the health of the population overall.

On the one hand, it is quite clear that more efficient health care treatment will result in a situation in which a care facility is able to treat more patients. It is not uncommon for patients to endure lengthy waits in health care settings. Those settings that are able to expedite such a waiting period due to improved information technology and administrative processes, added clinicians, and improved utilization of space in their facilities will enact greater degrees of efficiency.

From this perspective, they will be able to treat more patients in the same amount of time that another facility that lacks the aforementioned efficiencies can. Research "suggests that reducing waits by 10% could increase volume by 3 to 10%" (p. 133) of patients that a care facility treats.

The result is that more patients will get the services they need, and also enjoy an experience that is less time consuming which could influence them to go back for treatment more than they otherwise might if they had to wait for substantial periods of time. This fact is corroborated by the reality that, "Ample evidence indicates that long wait times discourage patients and drive up costs" (p. 133). In this case, efficiency directly translates into more satisfied patients and a healthier population than is otherwise possible.

There are also very advantageous cost benefits to running processes in a manner that is efficient in any variety of patient care settings. Quite simply, processes that take longer periods of time to complete tend to cost more than those that take less amount of time to complete. This fact is readily discernible in other aspects of the health care industry such as that which pertains to pharmaceuticals.

Research and development departments frequently represent one of the most time consuming and expensive aspects of pharmaceutical companies that are trying to get new drugs and products to market. In certain instances, they can utilize new technologies specifically designed for big data that utilize semantic graphs and facilitate intuitive, real-time data discovery, that could drastically reduce the expenses and time to market of new products (Zaino, 2015). This same principle lends itself easily to care settings in a number of different ways.

Facilities that can increase their efficiency in analyzing the results of patient diagnoses related to various procedures could actually decrease the costs of those procedures, which could make them more affordable and spur more patients to get them. In this respect, care facilities can not only decrease their costs, but also increase.