Guide: How to Streamline Healthcare Meeting Management

Meetings are essential elements of governance when they are managed effectively. Although you sometimes hear of meeting fatigue and stakeholders complain about the number or length of meetings they attend, this is generally a sign that planning or execution could be improved. When you streamline your processes, you can create a vibrant, collaborative environment that leads to better decisions to the benefit of your organisation. 

However, iBabs’ State of Meeting Management survey found that healthcare groups, such as the NHS in the UK and blue light organisations, were falling short in some key areas of meeting management. For example, only 35% of respondents in these areas said that sharing documents with other participants of the meeting is efficient and easy. Furthermore, only just more than half (53%) of healthcare professionals agreed that action points from meetings remained a priority. 

These findings are significant because they suggest that many organisations in the healthcare field run meetings where participants are underprepared and, whatever decisions they make, they are not always put into action. This can lead to a loss of trust in the process and suboptimal outcomes. This article explains why it is important to streamline healthcare meeting management and how to put it into practice where you work. 

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Why effective meeting management matters in healthcare

The NHS clinical governance guidelines for England set out ambitious goals to address health inequalities across the country. They compel organisations to consider these important elements when developing governance frameworks: 

  • Quality assurance
  • Quality improvement
  • Risk and incident management. 

These are challenging topics to integrate into the running of healthcare groups. Only through effective healthcare meeting management can you understand how they apply to your particular organisation, the strategies you must implement to achieve them and to be able to apply the necessary accountability to bring them to fruition. 

Where meeting participants do not have access to the necessary documents or where there is no drive to carry out tasks to realise the decisions made, it becomes more challenging to meet your objectives. You also risk working towards objectives that do not add the required value to your organisation. 

When the overarching aim is to improve patient outcomes, more effective meetings can lead to the organisation saving more lives and delivering a better quality of life for service users. With the stakes being so high, it is essential that healthcare providers ensure they meet their good governance obligations. Streamlining meetings to make and action better decisions more efficiently is a key element of this.

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How to streamline healthcare meeting management

Define clear objectives

Consider where the roadblocks are in your current meeting process. Does it take too long to create agendas? Can your stakeholders communicate and collaborate between meetings? Are decisions being made but actions falling by the wayside? Work with your colleagues to create a list of improvements you want to make to the process of managing your meetings and prioritise them accordingly.

This helps you develop material objectives that you can work towards, targeting those areas that will make the most difference to your outcomes. Having this focus from the start will make it easier to achieve aims that add value to your organisation. 

Use centralised software

When you try to collate all the elements relating to a meeting through email or postal mail, it can become disorganised. You risk losing important documents or facing problems with version control. 

Having a single source of information in the cloud allows you to order all the reports and presentations, connecting them directly to the agenda so that they are easy to find when needed by your meeting attendees. It is much less overwhelming for participants who can search for what they need easily, rather than having multiple emails to keep track of. 

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Automate scheduling

The medical field is a fast-moving and busy environment, which can make manually scheduling meetings a challenging task. It involves an individual having to cross-reference all participants’ schedules to find a free window, avoiding clashes that would mean key stakeholders would be missing from a meeting. 

Use meeting planner software that automates the process of finding these free times, scheduling meetings at the most convenient juncture. Not only does this mean that you have all of the relevant stakeholders at your meetings, which is essential for utilising their expertise to make better decisions, but you also free up your administrators. 

Prepare agendas in advance

Your meetings are likely to discuss complex matters which could impact the health and wellbeing of your patients and community members. As such, participants need support to be able to research the matters at hand thoroughly and consider their input and any questions they may have on your meeting topics. 

One way to help facilitate this is to ensure they have access to the meeting agenda in good time ahead of the meeting. 

During meeting preparation, create clear and structured agendas, attaching documents to help participants understand the topics for discussion and the details surrounding them. This allows them to consider them in depth so they are ready and well-informed at the meeting. 

On the agenda, make sure the discussion points are focused on specific areas rather than including generalised themes. This helps with guiding members’ research. Allocate realistic time slots for each topic, but be sure to stick to the timings so that the debate stays on track. 

Assemble the right participants

Think about the aim of the meeting and the nature of the discussion topics to be able to invite the right participants to it. Invite only those stakeholders who will add value to the meeting and whose input is essential for the topics being discussed. 

If you invite people who do not have the necessary experience or expertise, the meeting could become unfocused, as they may contribute information that takes you away from the point of the meeting. It is also not fair to take up their valuable time with matters that do not concern them. This can lead to your stakeholders distrusting your meeting processes and not feeling engaged in the future, even when meetings do call for their input. 

Smaller meetings with only relevant stakeholders are more focused and efficient. 

Support real-time collaboration

Under the Health and Care Act 2022 and the associated governance guidelines, organisations within NHS England are encouraged to harness the power of collaboration. Whether it is within your organisation or between your organisation and its partners, the ability to work together to achieve better outcomes is essential. 

Ensure there are opportunities for participants to collaborate on documents before the meeting takes place, helping to hone the agenda and spark ideas for discussion points during the meeting. This means that everyone enters the meeting room better prepared and having engaged with other attendees, building a closer working relationship that will help to make more efficient and effective decisions. 

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Record and archive meetings

It is often helpful to be able to refer back to previous meetings to understand what was decided and how that decision was reached. This is why taking clear and concise meeting minutes is essential. They act as a record of discussion points, decisions and action points. By storing these in a database, such as your iBabs meeting portal, you can search for keywords and find when and where topics were discussed. 

In the event of compliance investigations and audits, it is important to be able to access this information in a timely manner to prove that the organisation took all necessary steps to act in the best interests of its patients and community members. 

Set clear follow-up actions and monitor progress

The decisions you make in meetings are irrelevant if you do not have a process in place to follow them up and bring them to life. This is why it is important to assign action items in the meeting and back them up in the meeting minutes. You should also state who is responsible for this follow-up and a deadline by which they should have implemented the action. 

This bestows accountability onto the assignee and, by monitoring their progress, you keep them on track to action the decision. This maintains the momentum of the meeting process and ensures your meetings are worthwhile. 

Healthcare meetings involve some unique considerations that you must be mindful of when creating your meeting processes. They include:

  • Considering patient privacy within discussions. With meetings kept on record as part of an audit trail, you need to understand what data can be revealed during meetings and whether the Data Protection Act 2018 will allow for the information to be stored in such a manner. Only authorised persons should have access to patient details, and you must find a way to avoid identifying them in discussions with third parties. 
  • Meeting records policies. In accordance with NHS guidelines, you must retain records, including accurate documentation, for audits, legal compliance and future reference. Define access permissions for this data as well as retention periods under the law. 
  • Ethical considerations in clinical discussions. These conversations should always feature patient welfare as the ultimate goal, ensuring you make decisions free from bias and conflicts of interest. You need to have in place frameworks for addressing ethical dilemmas, promoting transparency and adding accountability to all decision-making. 

Challenges in healthcare meeting management

ChallengeSolutions
Time constraintsRefine the number of agenda items you add, prioritising those most important for the organisation and its patients. During meeting preparation, set time limits on discussions and have the chair stick to these stringently.
Balancing administrative and clinical prioritiesEnsure you only invite the relevant parties to meetings so that your healthcare team has time to carry out all duties. Use a healthcare meeting portal to streamline meeting management, cutting down on the time administrative staff spend on the process. 
Ensuring collaboration in all teamsCreate open communication channels for meeting participants to work together even outside of the meeting room. The more they share ideas and suggestions, the more efficient your meetings will be.
Data and privacy concernsPut in place compliance initiatives, such as secure communication channels with robust access control so that all sensitive information is protected and accessed only by healthcare meeting compliance stakeholders. Make sure you also have a secure document management system so that only authorised individuals can retrieve private details. 
Preventing meeting fatigueOnly invite participants with relevance to the objectives of the meeting so as not to overload employees with meetings. Keep meetings short and to the point with tangible outcomes that are completed so that participants understand the value of holding them.

FAQ

What are the best tools for managing virtual healthcare meetings?

A meeting portal with video conferencing capabilities ensures all participants have access to a meeting, even when they are not physically present. It is recommended that the portal features a method for online voting to ensure maximum security and privacy for your meetings, avoiding third-party apps that may expose you to data leaks. Your solution should also allow participants to collaborate with each other on documents kept in the cloud. 

How can sensitive patient data be protected during meetings?

Limit access to only authorised personnel with secure log-in details to access such information. Anonymise cases if working with other stakeholders so there is no identifying information shared. 

Conclusion

Streamlining healthcare meeting management is essential for freeing up the time of your stakeholders, making more focused decisions and following them up to fruition. To help the organisation in its mission to improve patient outcomes through effective meetings, you can make sure that the time your team spends in meetings adds value to the way you care for service users and improves outcomes. 

Using iBabs for meeting preparation and execution helps you achieve this, with secure access control, streamlined agenda and minutes templates, video conferencing, voting functionality and the ability to store and collaborate on documents in the cloud. It also allows you to monitor progress towards the completion of action points. Request a demo of iBabs today

References and further reading

iBabs Meeting Assessment
iBabs is a leader in paperless meetings and enables you to reduce these piles of documents to the thickness of your tablet. Thousands of organizations have been using this system for more than 15 years.

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