Protecting Your Bucket for Funding Future Growth
As health care enters the 2020s with far fewer big revenue opportunities and the lack of payment for treating medical events considered to be preventable such as infections and other complications of care, its providers are now faced with a very big question about how they are going to build their profitability going forward if they cannot effectively manage the three financial buckets that determine business health. It is a question that now raises the bar on how well they manage their buckets for funding future growth, surviving the present and fixing the past with a clear understand that it is how many wasteful costs leaders tolerate in their buckets for fixing the past and surviving the present that ultimately determines what ends up staying in their buckets for funding future growth. That means that the size of one’s operating margin is a product of how well a leader designs and operates the environment her or she is in charge of to manage to the “1” in the 1:10:100 Rule so to control for preventable costs in the bucket for fixing the past and does it in ways that are business smart enough to control for and reduce how much he or she ends up spending in the bucket for surviving the present.
SQSS was designed by a past hospital CEO having forty years of experience in the fields of healthcare quality and risk management with the goal of helping providers getting control of how they distribute their money and manpower across their three buckets in an environment where who survives and who does not is increasingly dependent on how leaders manage the basics of business health. While it has historically been easy for health care to treat wasteful costs in the buckets for fixing the past and surviving the present as necessary evils of some regulatory requirement, the day has arrived where they have to start differentiating between costs that are truly necessary and those that are a wasteful product of an age old game of tit-for-tat. It is like the hospital that bought a very expensive piece of new technology with the goal of using it to make the kind of big money that would allow it to buy more technology. After it got done spending big in both its buckets for fixing the past and surviving the present because of how poorly it managed all the variables that came with implementation and basic operations, its promising purchase turned into one more expense that pushed it along on its journey of decline. Not understanding that if it wanted to achieve the gain it was hoping for it had to get as much right the first time in the most business smart ways as possible, this hospital, like so many providers today, lost out because it was still practicing a kind of little quality that ignored how much money and manpower keeps getting allocated out of the bucket for funding future growth to wastefully pay for a number of preventable expenses in the buckets for fixing the past and surviving the present.