With all the complexities facing home-based care providers today – compressed margins, costly regulations, staff shortages, and mergers and acquisitions, to name a few – it’s no wonder that centralization has soared in the past year as a method to optimize operations.
Just like most changes, however, centralization is easier said than done. Even with a straightforward plan for consolidating processes, there are complexities associated with the undertaking – employee emotions, gaining full adoption, how to communicate effectively, and avoiding the perception that local control is being undermined by distant corporate policies, again to name a few.
Luckily, if you are an agency considering centralizing or improving upon previous efforts, there is a resource available to help your leadership team do it right. “The Pros and Cons of Centralization in Home-Based Care Operations” is a Forcura CONNECT Webinar, presented in partnership with Maxwell Healthcare Associates, that tackles these challenges and offers market-tested guidance from home-based care industry veterans.
Starting with the baseline question, “What is really meant by centralization and what needs to change about the narrative?”, representatives from Mission Healthcare, Maxwell, and Forcura agree that the main goal of centralization should be to provide dedicated support for administrative tasks so that clinicians can focus more exclusively on patient care.
In addition to the rewards and challenges, the panel discusses other critical topics associated with centralization:
- What operational areas are typically best suited for consolidation?
- How do you balance the benefits of local relationships with the corporate perspective?
- When is the most appropriate time to consider implementing this model?
- How do you approach a winning execution plan for your clinical and administrative staff?
Key Takeaways
Evelyn Frye, Strategy Consultant with Maxwell Healthcare Associates: when looking at opportunities to centralize non-clinical duties, start with areas that not only need to improve but strategically align with your agency’s goals.
“Because especially when you're looking at your problem areas, it's not that the branches don't want to do these items, but they're struggling to get to them. So, setting up a team that can prioritize those tasks and really have efficiencies with it, immediately off that, you're going to start to see measurable results towards your goals. And that's a good place to start.”
Mag VanOosten, Chief Clinical Officer at Mission Healthcare: organizations don’t have to sacrifice presence in local service areas to achieve corporate objectives through centralization.
“I think we start the conversation with healthcare is local, we have an agency still there and serving the community. All our centralized team members, they're using technology. … So as long as our agency leaders are able to say we have a team that expands … as long as we keep that communication clear and we kind of manage up what we're doing, then I don't believe one has to be sacrificed.”
Charles McDonough, EVP and President of Home Health for Mission Healthcare: there are pivotal points to look out for when thinking about the most appropriate time to roll out centralization.
“We have to be able to continue to find ways to care for our patients while gaining economies of scale and growing as an organization. When the administrative work prevents you from being able to get to the patients or the burdens or the cost of the business prevents you from being able to care for the patients … when those two things start to converge, that's when you have to begin the conversation.”
Windy Adams, Senior VP of Client Engagement and Strategic Partnerships at Forcura: lean into change management principles that drive full adoption and eventual success.
“I think it's really important to make it an exciting change for the organization. … but also being transparent about the benefits. It's writing transparency into what tool sets are going to be given to the team to help make those processes easier. Once they see the change come to fruition and feel the benefits, you'll definitely have success across the organization, especially as you start to build those champions who can help you evangelize that across the organization.”
Your Free Change Mangement Toolkit
Derived from Forcura’s decade of experience in supporting change management for our clients, this toolkit includes checklists, timelines, case studies, and more.
Go deeper into the conversation and watch the full recording of our webinar today!
