Unraveling productivity

[Guest guest]

I am a Rehab Director for a group of continuing care retirement communites;

we're being asked to look at productivity, but currently have no tools for doing

so! Our services are 80% subacute with some outpatient- all older adults, some

living on our 40-50 acre properties across the spectrum of independence, and

some from the community at large- all older adults. We've started the move

toward an electronic management system corporate-wide which will include

integrated therapy documentation systems and reports including productivity, but

it will be another 1.5 to 2 years before that is in place.

In the meantime, I developed an excel tool that requires input of daily units of

therapy provided for each staff member and time adjustment by our working

managers. I've been given a target productivity of 50% for our working managers

and 70% for staff by Administration, but no guidelines as to what constitutes

the parameters- so I tried to come up with a " fair " way of looking at that as

well. I could not find much help in literature, and the APTA's productivity

poll is apples and oranges... So currently we take out time for lunch,

non-chargeable education (both provided by us to others and attended by us-

mandatory inservices and continuing education programs) and .5 hour " patient

management " time- because we are a patient-centered care organization and

addressing the needs of our patients and residents on the fly is an expectation.

This leaves meetings and documentation in the mix in addition to chargeable

patient care. I've spent a lot of time trying to address barriers to

efficiencies, including scheduling, documentation, reallocation of non-therapy

tasks and reorganization of patient services. SNF census is a big factor in our

productivity outcomes (not something we can control directly!) however since we

started tracking in December 2008 our managers tend to run a bit high on

productivity, while some staff struggle to meet expectations- particularly those

who are new to their profession and those who are scheduled for shorter

workdays.

What factors are others including in their productivity analysis?