JM2010 Round Table: Return on Investment (ROI)
Posted on February 2, 2010 by kcarlson | No Comments
By Evonda Copeland, Supervisor, Library Services, Scottsdale Healthcare, Scottsdale, AZ.
Round Table: Return On Investment: Library Staff and Services. Facilitator: Suzette Kopec, Carondelet Health Network, St. Joseph’s Hospital Medical Library, Tucson, AZ.
Questions posed by the group:
- Libraries are downsizing & cutting budgets. What are the implications? What are libraries paying for, and how does it help the enterprise, impact patient care, and assist in training healthcare providers?
- How can we quantify what we do in a meaningful way?
- How do we turn those numbers we track into something useful? What do we do with our numbers?
- What are hospital administrators focusing on regarding ROI? What are hospitals tracking? Patient satisfaction, risk assessment/outcomes, length of stay, anything else?
- Can you translate literature searches and article retrieval into patient care?
- Does marketing trump ROI? Does relationship with administrators carry more weight than ROI?
- Do we record & report what we THINK should be important to administrators, or do we record & report what they actually ask to see?
- What can we (librarians) learn from the business model of information brokers? Is there anything they are doing that we can replicate/integrate into our business model?
Points of interest:
- Get involved in policy & procedures committees, patient care services committee. Look at it as investment in knowledge.
- Patient satisfaction surveys can help capture the direct impact of library services on patient care. Also survey your healthcare providers.
- Begin to assign your statistics directly to library programs and services (for example, TOC service, nursing services and/or nurse liaison librarian programs), and then query your relevant clientele (nurse administrators/educators, TOCs participants) to provide feedback via online surveys, emphasizing the importance of this feedback to the growth of that library service. Really lean on and rely on those professional relationships you have with your clients.
- Educate & promote to administration those non-clinical resources you offer (business resources & subscriptions, etc.)
- We work for data-driven people.
- We have to have both hard numbers and relationships.
- Capitalize on testimonials on your website. Consider a “I love the Library” video (Hopkins has one).
- Create a one-stop stats database to capture data AND testimonials so you can query & collate your data at a moment’s notice.
- Push out that doctor testimonial and attach an important stat with it – Dr Smith says how much the library has helped him improve patient care, then follow up the testimonial with a stat about the number of searches you’ve done this week/month/year for other doctors.
- Get a quote from your CEO that you can use in marketing pieces.
- Use customer satisfaction surveys & report comparisons to past surveys. Use the data, write it up & publish it. We are gatherers – let’s populate this information & publish it. People don’t know what you’re doing unless you tell them.
- Consult published studies on ROI and costs for replacing your library services on the retail market.
- Use software like Digital Measures (geared for faculty/academic) to track your professional activities & help you quantify what you’ve been doing in your role as librarian.
- Talk to administrators & ask THEM to quantify library services for you. Ask them what kinds of library statistics might be meaningful to them.
- Establish a Library Advisory Committee (LAC) to help develop meaningful measures for administrators and serve as library advocates.
- Use graphs/images to help show relationships & tell the story behind the numbers.
- Tracking consortial journal usage is difficult – in-house vs. external usage, type of clientele using them, etc. We need to find a better way to track this usage.
- It’s a matter of marketing & communication – letting users know that you can get articles quicker than they might think so please don’t buy off of publisher websites.
- We always promote ourselves as “we’re so inexpensive, we’re a great deal”. ROI calculators help put our value into context. Compare costs of maintaining a library to using an external information broker. Keep in mind that information brokers won’t have overhead and can set aside time for personalized service (they arent’ answering phones & covering service desks).
- Be aware that information brokers sometimes come into libraries to “set up shop”, help users for a fee, and you don’t even know they are there.
- The underlying message with information brokers coming into our libraries – people want articles! Librarians could do a comparison study of how quickly it takes library staff to get article vs. an information broker.
- Get to know your Quality Assurance people! Risk management is huge, especially at hospitals. Serve on Quality committees.
Taking it to the next level:
- Let’s find out what we need to know and do about ROI, and who can help train us/educate us.
- Let these round tables spin out into future workshops/CEs. We all have the same concerns.
- We need an ROI continuing education class at the next Joint Meeting! AAHSL had a speaker recently on ROI (need to find out who).
- We should have our own group /listserv/blog to keep ROI discussions going beyond the Joint Meeting, and invite the other ROI Round Tables to join us with their observations and concerns.
Posted 2/2/10
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