Cutting hospital costs without cutting staff.

A hospital that is seeking ways to cut costs without compromising care should resist the temptation to lay off staff and instead make it a priority to improve efficiencies. This approach requires a formal program to identify and analyze all of the hospital's processes. The focus of the analysis should be to determine which activities are being performed efficiently, which are being performed inefficiently, and which are unnecessary. This effort will achieve the greatest success if it is customer-centric.