Combining Clinical Expertise and Business Strategy for Better Patient Outcomes

The uncomfortable reality is that hospitals are businesses. Their primary function is to help people get better, but they do this all with respect to a different sort of bottom line. Doctors and nurses and the million other healthcare professionals occupying your average city hospital make their choices based on clinical expertise, always filtered through policies that have been designed by someone with an educational background much more similar to that of a business person.

Clinical professionals handle patient care. They make diagnoses. Insert IV lines. Empty bed pans.

Administrators grease the wheels. Collect revenue and use it to hire and pay those clinical professionals. Buy and maintain those big, life-saving machines. 

In this article, we take a look at how both aspects of health care help to fuel positive patient outcomes, particularly when they can collaborate effectively.

Overview

It’d be impossible to cover this topic without acknowledging the classic tension between the financial and clinical components of health care. 

Anyone who’s ever had an extended hospital stay has likely at one time or another encountered the thought: “They only care about money in this place,” all the while knowing that the doctors, the nurses, and the technicians that they’re actually coming into contact with truly are focused on improving their health.

It’s the invisible C-suite that so many of us have railed against at certain times in our lives—administrators, board of directors, people who influence the hospital’s choices without ever sitting by the bedside of a patient. 

Most of us are at least a little suspicious of the financial aspects of health care, understanding that business priorities and clinical priorities like patient safety and well-being cannot always be in perfect alignment. And when tension arises, is it the business or clinical side that wins out?

These are valid concerns, and for the record, they do not have a universal answer. On the one hand, doctors and nurses are sworn to provide the highest possible level of care to all of their patients, regardless of how their decisions impact the hospital’s profit margin. On the other hand, health care policies have become increasingly less user-friendly over the years.

The hypothesis we are working with is not that business thinking and clinical thinking are a match made in heaven. 

Rather, we’re settling on a much less controversial point: effective integration of business strategies that have been informed by clinical thinking can be more focused and more efficient in decision making than that which is inspired only by clinical thinking. In the next few headings, we take a look at what that means for our patients.

The other thing? Hospitals genuinely need business-minded administrators. Without them, nothing gets done. 

Financial

Doctors and nurses may do all the work that brings revenue into the hospital, but it’s administrators who make sure that it is covering all of the hospital’s expenses and being reinvested in the hospital in a way that guarantees the best possible long-term results. When hospitals get new machines or hire additional staff, it’s a direct result of keen financial management.

This sounds simple compared to, say, the clinical knowledge required to remove a tumor or resuscitate someone who’s been in a nearly fatal car accident. And maybe it is, but there are business ideals behind marketing, collections, reimbursement, and so on that do keep the wheels turning.

More to the point, the hospital needs to be strategic in how it acquires supplies, how it uses them, when, and how it reinvests in clinical programs. It’s easy to look at your hospital bill and assume that these healthcare networks are rolling in money. In fact? Hospitals work with razor-thin margins, sometimes as low as 2%. Without careful management, it would be very easy for a healthcare network to fall deep in the red. 

There’s only so much money to go around, and it’s the administrators who pick the best spots to use it. In this way, the hospital improves gradually, but in a sustainable fashion that will ultimately benefit the entire community when it is done correctly.

Staffing

Keeping hospital floors full of doctors and nurses is also an administrative consideration—one of the most important administrative considerations, as a matter of fact. It’s the good folks on the business side of hospital management who constantly work to ensure that the floors are staffed to capacity. They’ll do this through job postings, hiring pipelines, incentive programs, referral programs, and more.

When they fail to keep the hospital almost fully staffed, the consequences are immediate. Care becomes bottlenecked. Patients lose valuable time. Outcomes suffer.

How Do You Get a Job on the Business Side of Health Care?

That’s a good question, one that will ultimately depend on your ambition. There are a variety of administrative health care degrees that are basically business education programs with a more granular focus on work done in the hospital setting.

There are even degree programs that combine nursing education with business management skills. MSN/MBA programs are dual degree certifications that allow students to develop clinical knowledge alongside business leadership skills, all in the same two to three-year window.

People who receive an MSN/MBA degree are specially prepared to work as health care leaders. This could involve taking on roles still within the bedside setting, or it could mean working in the administrative offices, possibly even going so far as the executive suite.

There are many ways to contribute to your health care community, and all of them are impactful. While the business aspect of health care is often viewed with an element of discomfort, it’s at least just as important as the clinical considerations. Certainly, one cannot exist without the other.

If you are ready to make a difference as a health care hero, then the next step is to figure out the best way for you to personally contribute and identify a program that will help you find work consistent with that set of responsibilities.