How Can Human Resource Technology Better Help You Manage Your Employees

Vishal Gandhi
In healthcare we love to talk about ways we use technology with patients. We chart patient visits in the Electronic Medical Record. We schedule and bill patients and insurance companies from a Practice Management System. We interact with patients through a patient portal. All of these technologies can be great, but how come we don’t talk more about the way technology can improve how we run our practices and manage our employees?

One example of this is using technology to improve your HR. We see this in many other industries and at a few of the large hospital organizations, but for the most part healthcare hasn’t benefited from great HR practices that utilize technology. As healthcare organizations continue to consolidate, it’s going to be extremely important that every healthcare organization has a well designed human resource program to train, track, and retain key employees.

Let’s look at three areas you can use technology empowered HR practices to track, manage, and improve your human resource efforts:

Employee Growth Milestones
Are you creating a growth plan for your employees? Do you have a system that tracks that growth plan for your employees? If you don’t have either of these, then you’re missing out on a big opportunity. By setting growth milestones or goals for your employees you inspire them to be better and do more. Plus, employees love to know that there are opportunities to grow within your organization and a clear plan of how that growth can be achieved. However, along with setting these milestones, you also have to have a way to track how your employees are doing in their efforts to achieve these milestones. Otherwise, there’s no reason to set a growth milestone if you’re not going to evaluate it later.

Healthcare Human Resouce Management
While you could do this milestone tracking on paper or in a set of Word documents, we know what happens to those documents. They get filed away and forgotten. The better option is to use an employee management system which integrates these growth milestones into your employee’s performance milestones. Then, you can see how an employee’s performance corresponds to their growth milestones. Plus, with an integrated package, you can regularly be reminded of those growth milestones.

Employee Performance Milestone
Now that you’re setting growth milestones for your employees, let’s consider how you can track an employee’s performance. Doing so will encourage better performance and will provide you a way to reward those employees who are delivering great results and work with those employees who aren’t progressing towards their growth milestones.

A great example of this is with your medical billing staff. Using technology you can track the performance of that medical billing staff. How many insurance checks did they do? How many claims are they processing? How many collections phone calls did they complete? Each of these items illustrates how well that medical billing staff is performing their job’s duties. By integrating this tracking into your human resource management system, you have an objective way to evaluate and reward your employees.

Employee Benchmarking and Productivity
Now that your employees have a set of growth milestones and you have the ability to track their performance, you can effectively benchmark your staff and evaluate their productivity. Once again, while this can be done on paper, it’s much more effective and efficient with technology.

Benchmarking your employees against their peers is incredibly valuable because it helps a manager evaluate which employees might need more help and which employees deserve to be rewarded for their hard work. Without these benchmarks, we have to base our evaluations on how we feel and that can often be wrong.

A great human resource management software can facilitate an improved HR program for your employees. Doing so is extremely important to your organization so you can retain their key employees. Human resource management software gives the best employees a roadmap for how to be rewarded in regular performance evaluations. On the other hand, it also helps an organization evaluate their poorly performing employees so they can either help them improve or let them go. Healthcare organizations that choose not to utilize technology in their human resource management efforts are likely to lose their best employees as they fall behind their competitors. That’s a recipe for disaster in the competitive healthcare environment.

The Cost Effective Healthcare Workflow Series of blog posts is sponsored by ClinicSpectrum, a leading provider of workflow automation solutions for healthcare. Check out their healthcare Human Resource management module, HRMSpectrum to help improve your HR management efforts.