Join us tomorrow April 25th for a #medlibs Twitter chat at 6pm Pacific/9 Eastern on the topic of the business of hospital libraries, hosted by Michelle Kraft (@Krafty).
The Affordable Care Act has changed the way hospitals are reimbursed for medicare patients. In the past hospitals made more money off of patients who were readmitted for things they were orginally discharged with. Now, they are penalized for readmissions happening within 1 month of discharge for certain conditions. This means that a lot of hospitals are going to be seeing losses of millions of dollars.
Where does the library stand in the face of these losses when technology has changed the way we search for things and users often search Google before asking a librarian.
The librarian needs to get lean and mean and start operating his/her library like a hospital department that is responsible for achieving the specific goals of the hospital. So if the hospital's goal is to reduce readmissions by x% then the librarian needs to figure out specifically how the library can help the hospital do that. (If your answer is I can give them more literature searches, then think again because that won't help you keep your job because administrators think they can do that already.)
This tweet chat will discuss the various ways librarians can specifically show their worth to their own administration instead of passivley pointing to some standard or study illustrating the need for a hospital library. We will be discussing ideas of what we can do to answer our administration's always constant question "What have you done for me lately and why should I give you money instead of another department?" The game has changed and we need to change our strategy.
Here are some resources that I know will pop up during the discussion.
- NN/LM Library Value Calculator
- Other NN/LM Library value calculators
- University of Maryland Health Sciences and Human Services Library return on investment libguide
