Creating efficiency with your medical fitness center

A medical fitness center can bring a number of significant advantages to any health system, including a boost in community wellness, better recovery for outpatients and even an enhanced reputation as an employer and provider that values comprehensive health resources.

That said, are those benefits coming at too high of a cost in terms of management effort and overall budget? Simply having a strong end result isn't enough if a center isn't run effectively, since that can threaten long-term sustainability. Throwing more funding at the issue through hiring more staff or outsourcing additional services can be a temporary solution, but it doesn't address how to make a center more efficiently managed.

Here are some ideas for making the most of your current staff and administration, without revamping your budget or risking management burnout.

Understand a retail-based business model
A major aspect of lost time and a stressed budget can come from the way a medical fitness center is run at a fundamental level. Often, management has come from the hospital or clinic side of the health system, which is operating as a very different business model than a fitness center. Trying to use those same approaches can create inefficiencies that worsen as time goes on, and prompt more effort from managers than needed.

Because it has a membership base, a medical fitness center is a retail-based model, similar to a cash-based business. Selling memberships is obviously not the same as caring for patients, even though they both have the aim of fostering better health and wellness. Yet, medical fitness centers sometimes try to run in the same way as a hospital, particularly with a strong emphasis on administration. Ignoring the way a retail model works might allow a center to operate on a short-term basis, but in the long run, it can lead to effort that's being channeled in the wrong direction.

Get real feedback
To create more efficiencies in management, you need honest and insightful feedback about every aspect of how a center is run, from housekeeping to trainers to accounting. Member surveys can be helpful for getting an understanding about how your center is perceived — and whether members are satisfied enough to keep coming back — but those surveys don't give you info on how a center is managed. For that, you need an objective viewpoint that can see issues that employees and managers might be missing.

When HealthFitness manages a medical fitness center, we bring in a third-party vendor that specializes in data gathering to provide extensive feedback about all aspects of an operation. If you have a basement that's flooding, you don't focus only on draining the water — you need to understand where the leak is coming from. Feedback works in the same way, by highlighting areas of concern around how a center is run, so those small weaknesses don't become bigger problems when they're not being addressed.

For example, this type of feedback might reveal that a center is upside down financially — and burning out its managers along the way — because there are too many contractor relationships that require frequent renegotiation and constant oversight to ensure the work is getting done. Some centers may be sending out requests for bids for services that could be handled internally, from a health system's own staff and resource base. This could be draining a budget and causing a manager to spend far too much time stopping all those leaks, leaving much less time for more important work that contributes to a center's success.

Consider a specialist
Similar to bringing in an external agency to address housekeeping, food service, audit preparation, or nursing shortages, turning to a specialized organization for medical fitness center management can also be a boon. That's because a company that is familiar with just one industry can bring insights and resources to an engagement.

For instance, an accounting firm that only does financial audits of healthcare organizations knows all of the applicable federal and state tax laws, along with the missteps other health systems have made, so they're better able to offer that expertise.

Similarly, a company like HealthFitness, which only manages fitness centers, has significant experience in creating efficiencies and ensuring that these centers are run as effectively as possible. Although each center has unique needs, knowing the type of challenges and successes that other centers have seen can be a benefit for developing a financially stable, and even thriving, medical fitness center on any healthcare campus.

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