Q&A: Patient access staffing and budgeting
Q. What factors should hospitals consider when staffing and budgeting for the patient access department?
A. The key to staffing is knowing that you have right-sized your complement of staff. There are two parts to defining and obtaining the correct staffing for any aspect of the patient access operations. First, based on the defined process work flows, determine what skills are needed to complete the activities defined in the work flows. After the skills are defined, develop the position descriptions associated with the logically linked skills. Periodic review of all position descriptions and rating by the human resources department ensures that your staff members are appropriately classified and compensated for the tasks assigned.
The second aspect of right-sizing your staffing is to identify how many full-time equivalents (FTE) are needed to resource all of the tasks identified in your departmental work flows. To complete this activity, first list the tasks assigned to each of the current position descriptions. Next, identify current and annualized volumes related to each task. Then, through time studies and observation of work, determine, on average, the number of minutes needed to complete each task. Multiplying volumes by times and dividing by 60 will give you the staff-hours needed to handle the specified volume for each task. Complete a similar calculation for every task associated with the specific position. Add the individual staff-hour requirements together and divide by 2,080 hours to determine the number of productive FTEs required to complete the work identified in the work flows.
For more information, see The Complete Patient Access Handbook.
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