By: Susan Boydell | sboydell@barlowmccarthy.com
Healthcare teams are really good at figuring things out. When a process doesn’t work quite the way it should, someone creates a spreadsheet. Someone keeps a list. Someone knows exactly who to call. Someone checks the queue one more time. Someone follows up because they know that if they don’t, the patient might get stuck. And most of the time, it works. The patient gets scheduled. The authorization gets completed. The referral gets where it needs to go. Problem solved.
Or is it?
The problem with a good workaround is that it can make a broken process look like it’s working.
Pay Attention to the Extra Steps
Referral management is full of these examples. A referral comes in, but information is missing, so someone tracks it down. An authorization isn’t complete, so someone makes another call. A patient hasn’t been scheduled, so someone checks the status. A referring physician wants to know what happened to the patient, so someone starts searching.
None of these actions seems particularly significant on its own. But multiply them across hundreds or thousands of referrals and suddenly you have people spending a significant amount of their day keeping a process moving that should be moving more easily on its own.
Those extra steps are telling you something. They are showing you where the friction is.
Your Best Problem Solvers May Be Hiding Your Biggest Problems
There is an interesting irony here. The team members we value most are often the ones who know how to navigate the system. They know the shortcuts. They know whom to call. They know which referrals need a little extra attention and where things tend to get stuck. That institutional knowledge is incredibly valuable.
But it can also hide the size of the problem.
When talented people continually compensate for broken workflows, leaders may never see just how much effort it takes to produce the outcome.
The better question may not be, “Did we get it done?” It may be, “What did it take to get it done?”
Look for the Workarounds
If you want to understand where there may be opportunity in your referral process, you don’t necessarily have to start with a massive analysis. Start by talking to the people doing the work.
Ask them:
- Where do you have to intervene manually?
- What do you track outside the system?
- What requires another phone call, email or follow-up?
- Where do patients tend to get stuck?
- What information do you wish you had but can’t easily see?
- And perhaps my favorite question:
- What do you do every day simply because “that’s the way we’ve always had to do it”?
The answers can tell you a lot.
The Goal Isn’t to Eliminate the Human Element
Quite the opposite.
There are parts of the referral process that absolutely need people. Relationships. Judgment. Problem-solving. Patient needs. Exceptions that don’t fit neatly into a workflow. That is exactly why it is worth asking how much of your team’s time is being consumed by work that doesn’t require those skills.
In one medical group example, automating EHR creation and prior authorization work freed capacity equivalent to seven full-time roles and nearly $300,000 in annual administrative labor. The interesting part of that example isn’t simply the cost savings. It’s the capacity. What could those people be doing if they weren’t spending so much time compensating for the process?
Maybe the Workaround Is the Clue
We tend to think of workarounds as solutions. Sometimes they are.
But sometimes they are clues.
They show us where a process is harder than it needs to be, where visibility is missing, where technology isn’t supporting the work, or where we’ve simply accepted an inefficient step for so long that we’ve stopped questioning it.
So the next time someone on your team says, “Here’s what I do to make sure this gets done,” pay attention.
They may be showing you exactly where to look next.
Are you looking for more efficiency in you
Your team may be getting the job done, but how much extra work does it take to get there? Barlow/McCarthy can help you identify the workarounds, bottlenecks, and gaps that may be hiding inside your referral process, then turn those insights into practical opportunities for improvement.
Want to take a closer look at your referral process? Contact us at info@barlowmccarthy.com to start the conversation.