Many hospitals are still working to re-focus on areas of their operations that were deprioritized during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Rehabilitation Department is often one of these areas.
Hospitals may now see a need to develop long-term strategies to ensure they remain sustainable. The execution of these strategies and supportive objectives requires that skilled operators and strategists are installed to spearhead the effort. These teams must be supported by tools and resources that allow departments to excel.
We recommend that departments embrace critical thought process improvements in order to ensure long-term viability. With normalized patient volumes, departments must act as champions of logic and evidence-based decisions. To achieve this, departments must realize that record-keeping and data integrity are vital.
While many teams across the country still base their processes on systems developed over time, these are often outdated and suboptimal. Doing things “the way they have always been done” does not withstand scrutiny in the same way as data-backed decision-making. Data and logic are not only less prone to “blind spots,” but also introduce less bias than consistently acting “on a hunch.”