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Are you tracking the costs of the processes at your site? Do you know how much your quality programs are costing you? They should be saving more than you spend. Unfortunately, few healthcare organizations or even manufacturers have their accounting set up t

According to USFDA, a combination product is one composed of any combination of a drug and device; biological product and device; drug and biological product

o track costs for the many processes at their sites. Standard accounting procedures are good at tracking such things as expenses for supplies, for payroll and for accounts receivable. Unfortunately, accountants are not taught to track costs of processes such

; or drug, device, and biological product and fixed dose combination would include two or more combinations of drug.

Examples of combination products may in

as delivering an annual physical exam by a primary care physician or the expense of getting a room at a hospital ready for the next patient. Accounting software such as Quickbooks has no provision for tracking such expenses.

Why am I asking if you track the

lude drug-coated devices, drugs packaged with delivery devices in medical kits, and drugs and devices packaged separately but intended to be used together.

costs of your processes, anyway? There are several reasons. First, even if you are a nonprofit, you cannot afford to provide quality healthcare at a loss indefinitely. I know that it seems the Federal government expects just that in Medicaid programs and s

here is enormous increase in the number of combination products entering the market in the recent years. Combination products have proven advantages but fixe

eems to be heading in that direction with Medicare. Keeping track of your process costs will help you provide effective care at an overall profit if you use techniques such as value stream mapping.

Secondly, tracking costs with return on investments is the l

d dose combinations are still in the process of convincing regulatory authority on their advantages over the single ingredient formulations.

Combination pro

anguage of upper management. Management is more likely to continue support for a program or process if they can see a positive return on investment (ROI). If you can demonstrate a positive ROI through process accounting you will gain the confidence of manage

ucts have become life saving products for the pharmaceutical companies who doesn’t have many innovative molecules in their product pipeline and have been inc

ment in your healthcare programs.

Further, by controlling costs or even by reducing costs, you can pass on some savings to your patients and clients. This makes you more competitive and creates client loyalty. I believe that the delivery of medical care will

easingly used in the product life cycle management. Even the companies having product patents are trying to extend their product life cycle through the combi

only become more competitive in the United States. Recently, President Bush signed an executive order that the Medicare system should make available cost and quality data of healthcare providers that provide Medicare services. Locally, our hospitals are adv

nation products and maximize the revenues. But the companies involved in this practice are overlooking that they are burdening the patients both economically

ertising in order to compete in providing ER services. You have to be competitive; tracking quality and process costs will help a great deal.

What does it take to track quality and costs? Recently I was reading about a Six Sigma process improvement effort t

and physically. They need to rightly judge the benefits of the combination products and they have to even look at the risks involved when combining the produ

o decrease the time in order to make a hospital room available for the next patient. The article can be found on the iSixSigma website and is titled “Leverage Six Sigma to Improve Hospital Bed Availability.” Obviously, improving bed availability increases th

ts. Some of the combination products were well accepted by physicians while others suffered. Companies involved in development of combination products are fi

e income of a hospital. The key elements to track in making the bed available are ease and quickness of getting a physician discharge order, the time it takes to get the patient out of the room and to a discharge area, the time it takes to notify housekeeping

ding difficulty in defining their combination products and facing various challenges from selecting a combination to marketing it.

Following aspects would a

to clean the room, and the actual time to clean the room and make it ready for the next patient. The time spent in the first three steps does not produce income; it is a cost. Hence, you need to quantify how much it is costing you now to get through these s

dd to the challenges in developing combination products:

Which markets to tap where the combination products can do fairly well?
Which combination prod

teps. You can rather easily find the costs of supplies and labor in the actual cleaning of the room. A process map will help you get a handle of these costs. The cost of the present state is your baseline.

Next you should work with a team whose representat

cts are meaningful and rational?
Which therapeutic categories to select?
Which Combinations can address unmet needs of the patients?
Do combin

ives reflect the participants in the patient discharge process and any others who are invested in the process. The team should work on ways to shorten the time spent in getting the room ready and should set target benchmarks in terms of mean time with upper l

tions increase the patient compliance?
What would be the developing cost?
How to tackle the risks encountered during combination product developmen

imits and standard deviations. For instance, how could you shorten the time it takes to get a physician discharge order? Could you arrange to have a hospitalist provide the order when the primary physician is not readily available? Once a new process is des

t?

As combination products don't fit into the traditional categories of drugs, medical devices, or biological products, the USFDA is in the process of devel

igned, implement it a trial program and track the cost basis. If the costs are significantly reduced, then standardize the process and maintain it with occasional sampling. Report the improved ROI to management.

Another area that could utilize this process

ping new procedures for reviewing their safety, efficacy and quality.

Professional from academic institutions, pharmaceutical industries, health care indust

is the billing cycle in the primary care physician setting. You should follow the paper and electronic trail of a patient bill; make a process map of the cycle. Be sure to include the costs of having to resubmit the bill to an insurance company if there is

y and representatives from various regulatory agencies are working out to design the regulatory requirements for manufacture and sale of combination products

a billing error and to track the costs of failing to receive the full payment to which you believe you are entitled. Have as goals to completely eliminate rebilling because of errors and to consistently get the amount to which you are entitled.

I hope that I

.

As there is an increasing trend of the combination products companies manufacturing such products should be able to tackle the problems involved in the de

have convinced you that accounting for costs is as important as providing the best patient care that you can. I believe that every healthcare provider should not only concentrate on best practices, as is so often emphasized in today’s healthcare, but should

elopment. They need to be wiser in analyzing the market trends and the regulatory requirements.

Companies that provide selfless information through particip

also optimize ROI through process accounting and should concentrate on minimizing the time it takes to provide a service. If you can improve in all three of these areas, then all of the participants will be winners, both the patients and healthcare providers.

tion in industry events and feedback to regulatory authorities would be able to face the challenges and will be successful in developing combination products

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You can construct an almost infinite variety of calculators right within your MS EXCEL spreadsheet application.

In the UK, the insurance industry is backed by numerous professionals who all have a hand in making the insurance machine turn. Each job is another cog in the wheel, and insurance just wouldn’t be the same with out any of these cogs. One of the cogs in the wheel of insurance is loss adjusters.

There's a lot that job seekers can learn from successful sales people. This article provides a summary of a few basic sales techniques and how job seekers can to apply them.

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