Help staff focus on empowerment, creativity
Help staff focus on empowerment, creativity
Strategies to cope with managed care
When the traditional fee-for-service reimbursement system shifts to managed care, staff often go through an emotional upheaval similar to the loss and grieving process, says Connie Burgess, MS, RN, president of Connie Burgess & Associates, a Lakewood, CA, consulting firm.
This is because rehab providers are caring people who want to do everything they can for the patient and it’s painful when they have to limit their treatment, she adds.
Burgess recommends that management recognize what the staff is going through, talk with them about it, and educate them on the changes taking place in the marketplace.
"The staff often will harangue about changes because they think the administration is just trying to save money again. They have to understand that the days of just trying to cut the budget are gone; we’re into survival now," Burgess says.
Burgess advises rehab providers to "move beyond this gosh ain’t it awful’ place and look at what we can do with this patient."
People in immature managed care markets fear managed care because they don’t understand how it works and have heard horror stories from other parts of the country, Burgess explains.
"They have not had the experience and empowerment that comes to individual teams now that they are assuming more of the financial risk, and they have to make better decisions."
Here are some other tips for helping your staff cope:
• Give clinical staff the financial information they need to come up with an informed treatment plan.
"My experience has been that if you tell the treatment team here’s the patient and here’s the amount you have to treat him, they’ll come up with a plan every time," she says. (For more on how one team came up with a successful treatment plan at 69% of the usual daily rate, see case study, p. 5.)
• Learn to set priorities for a patient’s care. Focus first on what the patients need to know before going home, then look at what they can work on in the outpatient setting.
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