Team Management – Importance for Medical Lab Operations Management

Team Management is essential to drive productivity that enhances operational efficiency. For effective team management it is necessary to set performance metrics for each role. This helps to overcome daily challenges, identify performance and lastly set training programme, if necessary.

Goal Definition and Performance Monitoring

For a team to work well and be productive, it’s important for each member to know what they need to do, and why they are doing it. Usually the why comes from knowing what their performance will be judged on. When you don’t have good performance measurement systems with clearly defined metrics, it will usually lead to misalignment and a lot of time being spent on the wrong items.

Using KPIs or the OKR process of goal definitions, will give clarity to the team. You can use the, ‘user-wise billing report’,  ‘sample collected by collected person’ or ‘department-wise analytics’ to see work done by team members.

Resource Utilization

Having to orchestrate the proper resource for the task, so that you get things done is the logistical challenge that any lab manager faces. In technical terms, for you to allocate the optimum amount of resources, at any point of time, you would need to know the demand for a task. That is why having a system or a dashboard helps.

If you do home collections, you can see from home collection screen all the requests which need to be done. Similarly with appointments, you can see the appointment bookings which patients have made; especially, if you have radiology tests. Then, it becomes all the more important not only for the resource allocation but for patient experience.

You can also use the test analytics to find out the frequency of test requests; to analyse if you would like to process some tests only on a few days of the week in batches.

Trainings

Along with what to do, teams need to know how to do it. Many times the stuff learnt in school is not enough. Organisations need to take extra effort to train the staff which means having an effective training programme.

Employee training is one of the most effective ways to increase employee retention – a 2013 study from the Global Journal of Management and Business Research concluded that when employees are rewarded for undergoing training, 70% of them agree that they feel more loyalty to their organization.

Also, having better equipped staff helps them to take better decisions and in turn helps the organisation in terms of patient experience or operational excellence. Livehealth Academy can be one of the ways you train your staff in using the LIS solution which helps them understand the system better and at the same time reduces the burden on the lab IT team.

You can also take a LIMS course on lab operations here.