Accurate planning should minimise unplanned costs of additional capacity
Every business planning cycle your radiology department should use some form of demand and capacity modelling to calculate the required amount of reporting capacity. This planned capacity will be largely made up of consultant programmed activities (PAs) but may include some planned spend on additional capacity such as WLIs and outsourcing if in-house workforce capacity is insufficient to meet the predicted demand.
Yet unplanned costs of additional capacity rise during the financial year
Right from the start of the new financial year, you may encounter the need for additional unplanned capacity. The reporting backlog rises and the use of WLI payments to consultants and outsourcing companies like Everlight, Hexarad and Medica is higher than predicted. Why is that? And what are the causes? Self-evidently, this is caused by a mismatch between the service delivery, the reporting activity and the demand for reporting. What is not so obvious is the cause of this mismatch.
What causes a mismatch between demand for reporting and actual reporting?
An overall mismatch between the service delivery of a department and the demand for its services can be caused by several factors. Service planning and the forecasts of demand need to be as accurate as possible. But a monthly comparison of actual and forecast demand will highlight if this type of mismatch is driving the unplanned reporting capacity spend. Another significant cause of unplanned costs is the mismatch between actual service delivery and the expected service delivery. Your PAs of reporting activity should deliver an expected number of reports per week but the department is actually reporting less than that. In many cases it is this mismatch that drives the need for additional reporting activity.
“Capacity leaks” caused by a mismatch between expected and actual activity
A common cause of mismatches between service delivery and patient demand are “capacity leaks” where actual reporting activity is lower than would be expected by an analysis of the PAs. Understanding whether these capacity leaks are short-term hiccups or require adjustments to department operations is important in terms of quickly rectifying these unplanned costs of reporting activity. Whilst mismatches caused by inaccurate estimates of demand are difficult to solve in the short term, quickly appreciating mismatches due to capacity leaks can reduce unplanned spend rapidly.
Continuously monitoring the match between actual activity and expected activity
Whilst it is vital to monitor your actual delivery to expected delivery, it is not straightforward to do. Job plan information must be collected and analysed for any given period. Actual leave must be taken into consideration and reporting activity needs to be collated and analysed over the same time. We built Job Plan Match to do this analysis automatically and give senior executives better oversight on the causes of avoidable additional capacity. For the cost of less than a PA, Job Plan Match will give you better insight into what’s driving your additional unplanned costs of reporting.
To get an overview of exactly how Job Plan Match could help you, book a conversation with us here