A Practical Guide to Improving Healthcare Productivity

As a healthcare leader, you constantly balance the demand for high-quality patient care with pressing operational and financial realities. The pressure is always on to do more with less, but never at the expense of the patient experience.

This guide gets straight to the point. We will define what productivity actually means in a healthcare setting and show you practical ways to improve it across your organization.

What is productivity in healthcare?

Productivity in healthcare is not simply about the volume of patients seen. It measures how efficiently and effectively your organization delivers high-quality care. This means achieving the best possible patient outcomes while minimizing wasted resources, including time, materials, and team effort.

For an operations leader, this concept directly impacts key performance metrics. Greater productivity improves patient throughput and strengthens your revenue cycle management (RCM). When clinical workflows are free of unnecessary tasks, the financial health of your organization gets better.

If you manage a patient support team, productivity is about your team’s effectiveness. It is measured by the ability to resolve a patient’s question accurately on the first attempt. A high First Contact Resolution (FCR) rate means your team can help more people while improving patient satisfaction.

What are the primary barriers to productivity in healthcare?

Several key obstacles drain your team’s resources and get in the way of providing effective care. These barriers often create friction in daily workflows, leading to frustration and burnout. As an added resource, we’ve included some TextExpander templates and examples of how to use them below.

Administrative burden and clinician burnout

Your clinical team is likely spending too much time on documentation and administrative tasks. The constant demands of EHR data entry, charting, and filling out forms divert focus from patient care. This repetitive work is a primary driver of clinician burnout. For example, a simple SOAP note requires structured input that takes time to type out repeatedly.

TextExpander in action: A clinician can type .ssoap to instantly expand a complete, formatted SOAP note template, ready for their specific notes.

Inconsistent communication

When there is no standardized way to communicate, mistakes happen. Patients receive conflicting information, and internal teams waste time clarifying details. This not only creates a poor patient experience but also introduces clinical and financial risks. A simple billing question can lead to a long, confusing email chain if every agent phrases their response differently.

TextExpander in action: An agent can use a shortcut like ;billq1 to populate a pre-approved, accurate response to a common billing question, ensuring every patient gets the same clear information.

Inefficient workflows

Many processes in healthcare remain manual and repetitive. From patient intake to managing referrals and coordinating follow-up care, teams often perform the same tasks over and over. This wastes valuable time and introduces opportunities for human error, such as forgetting to include critical information in a referral.

TextExpander in action: A referral coordinator can type ;ref.cardio to generate a complete referral letter template for a cardiology specialist, ensuring all required patient details and clinical notes are included every time.

Information silos

Your organization uses multiple systems that often do not communicate with each other. This forces staff to manually re-enter data from one system into another, which is slow and a common source of errors. For IT managers, these disconnected systems represent a significant challenge for maintaining data integrity and security.

How can you measure productivity and efficiency in your organization?

To improve something, you first need to measure it. In healthcare, the right metrics depend on the specific function you are evaluating. True productivity connects your team’s effort to tangible outcomes.

For the operations leader:

Your focus is on clinical output and operational performance. You can track productivity by looking at key metrics that reflect the work being done and the resources used.

Key metrics: Look at physicians’ work RVUs (wRVUs or Relative Value Units), total patient visit volume, and average length of stay. It is also critical to measure time spent on documentation, as this is a direct indicator of administrative burden.

Benchmarks: Use internal data to compare performance between departments. To see how you stack up against similar organizations, use external benchmarks from sources like the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA).

For the support team leader:

Your goal is to measure how quickly and effectively your team resolves patient issues. Your metrics should focus on speed, accuracy, and patient satisfaction.

Key metrics: Track Average Handle Time (AHT) to understand the length of interactions, First Contact Resolution (FCR) to see if issues are solved on the first try, and patient satisfaction scores like CSAT and NPS.

Benchmarks: Compare your team’s performance against internal goals to drive improvement. You can also measure your results against industry standards for patient support centers to set realistic targets.

How can you improve productivity in the healthcare workplace?

Improving productivity is about giving your team better tools and processes, not just asking them to work faster. By targeting the most time-consuming and repetitive tasks, you can free up your staff to focus on higher-value work.

Standardize repetitive communication

Create a central library of approved messaging for common patient interactions. This includes appointment reminders, follow-up instructions, and answers to frequently asked questions. When your team has a single source of truth for communication, you ensure every patient receives consistent, accurate information. This saves time for your staff and reduces confusion for your patients.

Automate documentation

Give your clinical staff a way to automate routine documentation. With templates and shortcuts for clinical notes, patient instructions, and billing codes, you can dramatically reduce the time spent typing in the EHR. This directly addresses clinician burnout by removing a significant source of daily administrative friction.

Streamline team-wide knowledge sharing

A shared library of snippets ensures that everyone in your organization uses the same correct information. From the front desk to the clinical floor, your entire team can pull from the same up-to-date source for phone numbers, insurance codes, and patient education materials.

For example, a shortcut like ;preop.knee can instantly populate the exact pre-operative instructions every time, ensuring no detail is missed. This gives IT leaders confidence that information is controlled and accurate while making workflows more efficient for everyone else.

What is productive efficiency in healthcare?

Productive efficiency is the ideal state where quality care and operational excellence meet. It means achieving the best possible health outcome for a given level of resources, or delivering a specific outcome at the lowest possible cost. It is about maximizing value, not just volume.

This concept ties directly back to the strategies for improving productivity. When you reduce administrative waste by automating documentation and standardizing communication, you are not just saving time. You are reallocating your team’s most valuable resource—their expertise—away from repetitive tasks and toward direct patient care and complex problem-solving. This is how you achieve productive efficiency.

This approach is secure and effective for an IT manager. Using a HIPAA-compliant tool allows you to streamline workflows across the organization without introducing new security risks. You can empower your teams with the tools they need to be more efficient while maintaining control over sensitive patient information.

Conclusion

Boosting healthcare productivity is not about making your people work harder. It is about removing the obstacles that prevent them from working smarter.

By eliminating the friction from repetitive tasks and standardizing communication, you empower your teams to operate at their full potential. This allows them to dedicate their time and expertise to what matters most: providing excellent patient care.