ASSISTED LIVING

Staff experiences resident life in experiment in empathy

Leslie Pedtke spent more than two decades as administrator of an Illinois nursing home, where she first asked staff to undertake an experiment in empathy in the early 2010s. Her team members were invited to move in for days-long stretches, adopt a diagnosis commonly seen in the facility and then go through all of the care processes and challenges real residents faced.

Being fed pureed food, going a day without having their teeth brushed and having to remain in a wheelchair until a lift could be arranged so changed her workers’ response to residents that she soon made a pre-orientation overnight stay a condition of employment. Having lost privileges and freedoms during their imagined illness, caregivers became more attuned with residents’ daily needs and delivered them with more compassion, Pedtke explained.

HEALTHCARE TECHNOLOGY

How virtual sitter services saved St. Luke’s $1.5M in 2023

A Minnesota-based healthcare system has implemented a virtual sitting program which has

• improved patient safety through fall reduction and prevention,
• allowed for monitoring various vitals and specific conditions,
• improved staff efficiency and
• decreased staffing costs.

They estimate the program has prevented over 500 falls per month.

COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT

Excelas’ Community Spotlight

Excelas is proud to launch a new feature in our Newsletter. Our Community Spotlight will introduce some of our business associates to expand our community, build relationships, facilitate networking, and share valuable information with our subscribers.

Rehmann is a national professional advisory firm which provides full-service accounting, technology, and business consulting as well as wealth management services. For over 80 years, Rehmann has delivered forward-thinking solutions for a wide range of industries with over 1,000 associates in Michigan, Ohio, and Florida.

Among other honors, the company has been recognized for 21 years as a Best and Brightest Company to Work For, and its CEO, Stacie Kwaiser, recently served as a CEO panelist for the Best & Brightest Award Summit with Excelas President, Beth Wilson. The Rehmann vision is to “bring a bold new level of confidence, providing insights and solutions that maximize the potential of clients and associates.”

Rehmann recognizes that outsourcing enables companies to shift the burden of time-consuming administrative tasks to outside providers that can perform them more efficiently and effectively. This allows businesses to focus on critical functions, control costs, manage cash flow, pursue aggressive growth strategies, and hire quality talent.

Outsourcing: A powerful tool for growing businesses

SPOTLIGHT AUTHOR: The Rehmann Team

Growing a business is a challenge. It requires you to strike a delicate balance between pursuing aggressive growth strategies and hiring quality talent on the one hand and controlling costs and managing cash flow on the other.

In recent years, outsourcing has become a potent strategic weapon for many businesses. It allows entrepreneurs to focus on critical business activities while shifting the burden of time-consuming administrative tasks to outside providers that can perform them more efficiently and effectively. A number of business functions are potential outsourcing candidates — accounting and bookkeeping, information technology, human resources, payroll, accounts payable and receivable, and background checks.

Benefits of outsourcing

Outsourcing offers a variety of benefits to startups and other growing businesses, including:

Enhanced focus: Outsourcing enables business owners and executives to focus on core business activities and competencies — such as strategic planning, product development, sales, marketing and customer relations — without being distracted by administrative details.

Reduced costs and capital investments: Often, outside service providers are able to perform tasks more cost efficiently and faster than their clients. And they relieve businesses of the need to invest in technology, equipment or human resources.

Scalability: Outsourcing allows a business to increase or decrease services to meet its needs without the time and expense involved in maintaining this expertise in-house.

Higher quality: Outsourcing can provide access to highly skilled, innovative people — as well as cutting-edge technology — that would be difficult or cost prohibitive to develop in-house.

Emergency staffing: Outsourcing can help a business deal with the sudden departure of a key employee.

Outsourced accounting and financial services are particularly valuable. Too often, businesses take a “rearview mirror” approach to accounting. In other words, their accounting systems show them where they’ve been, but provide little insight into where they’re going. Outsourcing can provide businesses with access to cloud-based, real-time financial information and knowledge that enable them to better manage cash flow and address problems before they spiral out of control.

Is outsourcing right for you?

Whether you would be a good candidate for outsourcing — and, if so, which functions you should outsource — depends on the nature of your business. The key is to examine all of your activities to determine which serve your core business purposes and which are ancillary to those purposes. Ancillary activities may benefit from outsourcing if someone else can perform them faster, better and cheaper.

For some activities, the answer may vary dramatically from business to business. For example, a company whose core competency is manufacturing might outsource product design. However, a company that focuses on design or engineering might outsource the manufacturing process. And while technology is a core competency for a software developer or other technology company, it’s merely an administrative function for many other types of businesses.

In some cases, it might be appropriate to outsource only part of an activity. For example, many companies view marketing as a core business function, but they might outsource certain aspects of marketing, such as public relations or social media.

DEFENSE STRATEGY

Build a robust and agile defense strategy with the Excelas Process

Each year, we work on thousands of projects and handle millions of pages of clinical and legal documents. This experience has helped us standardize our approach to medical record review, simplifying the entire process. Getting started is as straightforward as a phone call! (click image to enlarge)