5 Ways to Avoid the Burning Platform Dilemma in Healthcare
Healthcare is a rapidly evolving industry, which can bring many challenges to the operational stability of facilities nationwide. With ongoing staffing shortages and increasing demands for patient care, facility leaders must remain adaptable to avoid situations that can lead to “the burning platform” — a phrase used to describe crisis situations requiring emergency actions.
The original burning platform story involves crew members caught in an oil rig explosion who had faced the dilemma of staying on the platform or jumping into the ocean to survive. In a business context, this story parallels scenarios warranting drastic changes in leadership direction to avert company downfall.
If you’re a healthcare leader concerned about the viability of your organization during a crisis and beyond, you may be looking for ways to reform your business strategy. We’ll discuss what can lead to a burning platform in healthcare and ways to protect your facility from preventable business crises.
What Is a Burning Platform?
“The burning platform” can apply to a range of crisis scenarios requiring difficult decisions. In recent years, this phrase has been commonly used to describe global-scale issues such as climate change, unregulated AI, and military conflict. Essentially, when people are faced with a burning platform dilemma, they must focus all of their energy into overcoming a threat to become safe again.
When healthcare leaders are faced with a burning platform, this typically means that clinging onto old practices has placed patients in precarious situations and put their organization at risk of closure. In these situations, leaders are forced to stray from their status quo operations and take steps to save their organization.
What Can Lead to a Burning Platform in Healthcare?
Any type of business can be at risk of facing the burning platform dilemma, and healthcare facilities are no exception. There are generally three overlapping issues that can make facility leaders more vulnerable to crisis-driven decision making.
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| Staffing Shortages | Burnout is common among healthcare workers, which can lead to high turnover and staffing shortages. Sustained staffing shortages can also contribute to burnout, creating a cyclical issue if staffing is not made a priority. |
| Financial Constraints | Without addressing staffing shortages, facilities must see fewer patients or risk compromising care quality. This can contribute to financial constraints, particularly for hospitals who still follow a fee-for-service model. |
| Care Fragmentation | Without enough staff and financial resources to deliver quality care, patients often fall through the cracks of the care process. This lack of accessibility and care fragmentation speaks to a larger, more systemic shortcoming of the U.S. healthcare system. |
Example of a Burning Platform Scenario in Healthcare
The COVID-19 pandemic was a real-world example of how exacerbating these common issues can lead to a burning platform. During the pandemic, healthcare facilities were faced with a historically high demand for patient care, which broke the boundaries of an already short-staffed and under-resourced industry.
Facilities had no choice but to spend monumental costs on staffing reinforcements and additional care centers to prevent wide scale deaths. Many patients were still unable to access care and dozens of hospitals were left bankrupt and at risk of closure post-pandemic.
Preventing the Burning Platform: 5 Essential Strategies
While COVID-19 was an unprecedented event, it exposed how failing to put out smaller fires ultimately led to a bigger disaster that forced facilities into taking drastic measures. To avoid similar dilemmas, healthcare leaders can take these steps to build a culture around prevention, rather than reaction.
1. Understand Your Facility’s Needs
It’s important to stay on top of what is and isn’t working for your facility. As a healthcare entity, finding the right balance between financial priorities and patient care goals can be key to your success. To avoid getting tunnel vision on financial earnings, comprehensively work to improve the quality of services that your operations grow from. You can take these steps to holistically assess the needs of your facility:
- Collect ongoing feedback from your staff.
- Conduct patient experience surveys.
- Regularly evaluate care outcomes and quality.
2. Proactively Address Existing Issues
Ignoring smaller problems at your facility can eventually compound to bigger issues that may place you in a crisis situation. If you identify any barriers affecting your facility’s ability to deliver quality care, work to remove them in a timely manner. You can start by asking yourself questions that are built off of the burning platform strategy:
- What’s the current problem and where is it stemming from?
- What’s the anticipated outcome if nothing is done to address the problem?
- Is this an opportunity to do things differently and what would be the result?
3. Keep Up With Industry Insights
Keeping up with the latest healthcare evidence and policies is an important way to ensure your facility isn’t falling behind. Health researchers and policy experts are constantly uncovering new ways to improve care delivery. Implementing these practices will help improve patient outcomes and sustain your operations. To stay up to date with best practice standards and relevant policies, you can:
- Utilize resources from leading policy organizations, such as CMS and AHRQ.
- Regularly update hospital protocols to reflect evidence-based standards.
- Adopt clinical decision support tools to facilitate the delivery of evidence-based care.
4. Invest in Your Workforce
For healthcare facilities, the workforce is the backbone of care delivery. Without a fully functioning healthcare team, you can’t provide the services that your business is built off of. Be proactive about addressing and preventing staffing shortages before they become a prominent issue. You can implement these strategies to build a more healthy workforce:
- Foster a positive work culture to prevent turnover.
- Build a long-term staffing strategy rather than finding temporary shift coverages.
- Optimize your float pool to better manage understaffing in nursing.
5. Embrace Necessary Change
As a facility leader, it’s important to remain adaptable to market shifts and innovations in the industry to strengthen your care delivery. Holding onto outdated practices can decrease your facility’s efficiency and increase your risk of facing crisis situations. Here are a few examples of ways you can embrace change:
- Focus on value-based care by moving away from fee-for-service payment models.
- Adopt new technology that will help streamline your care delivery and services.
- Follow best security practices by creating a network segmentation strategy.
Discover More Ways to Optimize Your Operations
Avoiding the burning platform dilemma requires a comprehensive strategy to improve your organization’s care delivery, workflow, and culture. Don’t miss out on other free, useful tips and strategies that can help your healthcare facility flourish.