When discussing the functional essence of home healthcare, we are not speaking about its moral essence, which is deemed to be a noble cause. But rather this concerns the nature of its operations. The business has three essential characteristics.
The Operational Fulcrum- Home Healthcare:
It is Distributed – geographically and in range of services.
It is Talent and Knowledge critical – the trained personnel doing the proper tasks.
It is Transactional – meaning small tasks and their details are the essential units and there are many and they are diverse.
The second part of home healthcare’s essential make-up concerns core cycles and their operative state. These areas speak to the required high levels of routine performance. The best way to put this may come from Jim Collins’s book Good to Great. In this he speaks about The Flywheel concept. How there must be relentlessly turning and within that a seeking of effectiveness. What are the flywheels for home healthcare?
Three Essential Cycles:
· The Patient Care cycle- primary tasks at the heart of the business, where sloppy effort and failure are not an option.
· Talent management and payroll cycles- without mindful and accurate performance in this area a lack of resources, errors, distractions and discontent will become the rule.
· Reimbursement and financial cycles – should these be ineffective, there will be at best a slow strangulation of resources and poorly framed information will author bad decisions and create multiple states of confusion.
