Abstract
The following research paper describes in detail the relevance of employee engagement to a healthcare provider. Engagement of employees is often an overlooked area of focus as hospitals look for ways to improve processes and reduce operating expenses. Healthcare is somewhat unique in that cost to the customer is not the main economic force driving patients to the various hospitals or healthcare providers. The focus of the following is to examine the importance of employee engagement hospital wide. There are factors that lead a prospective patient to choose one healthcare provider over another, assuming choices exist. When discussing engagement, emotions can play a very critical role, and the affects of employee engagement on measurable components of a successful healthcare system are extensive. This research will go into detail on how engagement impacts most areas of healthcare, including areas that many professionals in the healthcare industry may not even realize. Hospital executives are beginning to understand there is an economic relationship that exists between engaged employees and almost every other facet related to the operation of a successful health care system.
KEYWORDS. Employee Engagement, Patient Satisfaction, Healthcare Providers The Significance of Employee Engagement in Healthcare Employee engagement in theory is fabricated of simple practical concepts made up of common sense ideas. Countless companies each year, including the healthcare industry, spend millions of dollars trying to determine how to better engage employees and the impact it causes. How can companies spend that much every year just trying to figure this out? For example, in healthcare, a hospital will spend approximately $785,000 in total network and hardware configurations as part of the expense for the development of an Electronic Medical Records system (Renner, 2009). When
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