Here is a secret that we have been applying in our clinical supply utilization management practice for the last 10 years that can change the way you do business. We have been helping our clients to compare their clinicians’ supply utilization practices to their peers to get them to do the right thing. This technique has been confirmed recently by studies conducted by Dr. Jeffrey Linder, Director of the Primary Care Practice Based Research at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, as a winning best practice. Yes, it can nudge your clinicians to do the right thing!
Peer Pressure is Great Leverage for Changing Behavior
What SVAH’s studies too have shown is that your clinicians will change their bad supply utilization habits if they are challenged with data from their peers that shows they are out of step with their colleagues. For example, one compression sleeve peer benchmarking study we conducted for a community hospital showed that their cost per patient day (CMI adjusted) on compression sleeves was 260% higher than their peers and that their peers, for the most part, had standardized on calf compression sleeves vs. thigh and foot. As you could imagine, these evidence-based benchmarking studies enabled this hospital to save tens of thousands of dollars on just this one commodity.
Information Must Be Accurate, Easy to Understand, and Easy to Change
It would be easy for your clinicians to shoot you down if your information is inaccurate, hard to understand, and isn’t easy for them to make the desired changes. So make sure that your peer cohort is an exact match, your data is visualized, and you are ready to help with the desired change, because you are only going to get one chance to make this happen. If any of these essential ingredients for change are missing, you could wait for months or even years to broach this subject again.
Not All Clinicians Will Embrace Change
Even though our clients’ rate for change is about 97% with this technique, there will still be 3% of clinicians that won’t change no matter what evidence you show them. You have three options when this happens:
- Have your boss and their boss help you to help them through the change process. Meaning that you, them, their boss, and your boss sit down to discuss the evidence you have presented and why the clinician thinks they can’t change their behavior at this time. This meeting can tip the scale in your favor.
- Ask what it would take for them to make the desired change, and then follow through on their answer.
- Wait until another day to try again. This, as I said, could mean months or years before any change happens.
Your solution to this challenge always is to follow through with each of these steps until you reach the third step, which is to try again at another time. Then you know it’s absolutely time to move on because, from our experience, spending more time on this project won’t generate different results on a different day.