Eleven Ways Healthcare Leaders Can be More Efficient

You don’t need to attend every meeting to make decisions, says Jess Jones, managing director at Huron Healthcare Consulting. “This behavior both inhibits the growth and diversity of decision making in the organization while also taking up your valuable time.”

How to tackle this? Review each meeting by asking the following questions:

• Am I needed to lead or facilitate the meeting?
• Am I a necessary, key decision maker to move a process along?
• Or am I joining to gain information or to provide occasional input?

If it’s the third bullet, remove yourself from the meeting and empower members of your team to attend, facilitate decision making, and provide weekly updates.

Kirsty Boyd, director of process improvement at Newton-Wellesley Hospital, which is part of Boston’s Partners HealthCare, says this will help you focus on your priorities. “You may have 50 things to do, but if you get nothing else done today, what are the three most important things to get accomplished? Then, schedule time today to do them.”

No time on your calendar? Create a “to-not-do” list. That means taking a moment at the start of each week to go through your schedule and determine what’s not in line with your priorities-and cancel or reschedule those activities. This one simple act can help free up your time to focus on your three most important tasks.

Kalyan Jonnalagadda, a leader in Bain & Company’s healthcare practice advises executives to:

• Make 10 minutes by shortening meetings to 50 minutes versus 60.
• Take five of those minutes and clear your e-mail or think about the one action you can take in an area that matters to you. Perhaps it’s something small but meaningful to inspire your team.
• Give two minutes to exercise mindfulness, recommends Jonnalagadda. “Take deep breaths and center yourself. At the end of it, you still have three minutes to walk to your next meeting and not be late.”

Carol DeVol, chief operating officer for Huntington Beach, California-based Landmark Health, says if it’s something that will affect your metrics, pay attention to it. If not, delegate it to the right team.

“Make sure you have the right team in place and trust them to get it right,” she says. “I provide the right direction and input, but I don’t get too far in the details. I admit, this can be a hard thing to do, particularly if you’re moving from a start-up mode to a larger organization, but it’s the only way to scale.”

This tip comes from the Harvard Business Review article referenced previously: Be clear about your agenda so you can optimize your time. If you don’t, the loudest voices will take over, and you won’t get to advance your own agenda.

Also, take a “matrix approach” to agenda setting. This should include strategic areas for improvement and specific items that must be addressed, write Harvard Business School professors Michael E. Porter, PhD, and Nitin Nohria, PhD, who ran the study. CEOs have to include both time-bound goals and more open-ended priorities as they set their agendas.

To ensure alignment, you must communicate your agenda to members of your executive team, including your executive assistant. 

Boyd says it doesn’t matter if it’s as simple as responding to an e-mail or a voicemail. “Spend no more than two minutes on it,” she recommends.

“You can choose to either do it, delegate it, or delete it. If you can do it within two minutes, go ahead. If it will take longer, make sure to track it on your task list and schedule time on your calendar to complete the task. If you can delegate, make sure to flag it for follow up,” says Boyd.

Communicate your goals to your executive assistant, writes Daniel McGinn, a senior editor at Harvard Business Review, and Sarah Higgins, a Harvard Business School research associate, in Harvard Business Review.

That’s because it’s the little things that can have a huge impact on your day-from blocking out your calendar so no one can sneak in a 30-minute meeting to getting you out of your office by scheduling meetings in other people’s offices. Your executive assistant should also block out 30 minutes so you have time for a healthy lunch.

Technology helps with this, says Stephen P. Zieniewicz, MPH, president of Livingston, New Jersey-based Saint Barnabas Medical Center.

One of his priorities is to implement the best evidence-based delivery protocols for patients. That means his entire team needs to be on board, says Zieniewicz. The medical center has developed a program for identifying, applying, and tracking best practices. Also important is reducing variation, in addition to maintaining communication with team members.

To streamline adoption of new protocols, they must be hard-wired into the EHR, he advises.

Looking for proof this approach works? Saint Barnabas Medical Center used it to cut its sepsis mortality rate by half in the program’s first year.