Financial Improvement Taskforce builds on fiscal year 2024 success, encourages employees to share ideas

Penn State Health leaders created the Financial Improvement Taskforce – Project FIT 24 – in January to help close a fiscal year budget gap. The taskforce helped the system hit its budget target. Based on this success, leaders have launched Project FIT 25 to continue the work of identifying savings and expanding systemwide standardization and optimization initiatives.  When the health system identifies savings or increases efficiencies, additional funds are made available to invest appropriately in other resources, technology and people to expand access and advance new care options and services.

Project FIT 24 Recap 

From January through June 30, the team focused on work in progress that had the potential to enhance revenue or cut costs, improve patient and employee satisfaction and advance Penn State Health goals. They identified operational changes, efficiencies and improved workflows in three key areas:

• System standardization
• Improving access for patients
• Supporting our people/resource allocation

Key outcomes:

• Highmark Network integrity – Realized a significant increase in the percentage of patient care that stayed within the system.
• Standardizing surgical implants – Reduced variation in the use of surgical implants, resulting in cost savings. This work will continue as part of the Captis effort that begins in January 2025.
• Referral Center optimization – Improved referral and scheduling process to ensure more patients get timely appointments within the system and fewer patients leave the system for care.
• Access – Transition of Care Clinics helped to provide patients with an improved experience and improved follow up care following inpatient stays. Appropriate site-of-care work resulted in additional post-acute bed availability for Penn State Health patients.
• People – Created consistencies in contracted labor partnerships with AMN for nursing/allied health, and with Locumsmart for providers, identified savings opportunities in benefits and talent acquisition programs and accelerated leadership optimization structure work.

Project FIT 25

For Project FIT 25, the team will again focus on work in progress for system standardization, patient access and people. A new priority, revenue integrity, will expedite existing efforts related to point of care collections, billing and coding processes, observation utilization and denial management.

Departments, units and clinics across the system also adopted operational efficiencies and cost-cutting initiatives during fiscal year 2023-2024. Moving forward, employees can submit Project Fit 25 ideas for consideration. These proposed projects must meet these criteria:

• Immediate financial impact
• Connected to an organizational goal
• Focused on work in progress
• Aligned to rapid improvement support

Tomorrow’s edition of The Manager Update will include a related article to help managers guide discussions with their teams about potential Project Fit 25 ideas and how to submit suggestions.

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