Healthcare personnel shortages have organizations scrambling to find talent, automate what they can do, do more with less and increase efficiency. This is a challenge that existed before the pandemic but has become clearer since the pandemic began.
On a June Becker’s Hospital Review webinar sponsored by ServiceNow, the company’s healthcare CTO, Drew Koerner, discussed the factors affecting sustainability and offered digital solutions to help address this massive issue.
Four main takeaways are:
1. Health care is undergoing many changes, which require adaptation. Some industry trends are putting more pressure on health care workers. These trends include more personalized medicine and patient -centered healthcare; the change in the delivery of care, with more health care delivered at home; and remote patient monitoring systems that increase the complexity of care delivery systems and workflows.
So far, the healthcare industry has tried to respond to these and other changes by digitizing records, digitizing front ends and using relationship management systems. While information digitization is certainly important, these steps have created more loops and resulted in data sitting in both digital and analog formats. These actions only increase demands on health care workers and rob health care workers of time, increasing burnout and decreasing retention.
“We need to think about things differently,” Mr. Koerner said, in light of the current situation. He offers three specific ways to think differently.
2. Remove the “stupid stuff” that clinicians have to do. COVID is stacked with more administrative work than ever before with doctors, nurses, and other providers because they find themselves engaging in more responsibility without streamlined workflows. That friction falls into the days of clinicians and robs them of precious patient time. Automated manual processes and digitization are the keys to eliminating some of the non-value-added tasks that consume too much clinicians ’time and are detrimental to maintenance.
3. Digital, digital, digital. The key to successful digitization is to approach it from an experiential perspective, Mr. Koerner said. He described the benefits of having pre-built workflows and experiences with appropriate pieces.
With becoming more digital, a model of change will start in the first stage where things are too manual. The stages then move on a spectrum of increasing automation and efficiency to true business productivity, and ultimately, the future of healthcare work.
Also, part of digital transformation is engaging in ecosystem management, which includes managing providers, suppliers, partners and vendors through a comprehensive service delivery strategy that unlocks productivity. These measures save valuable time, improve the working environment and boost retention.
4. Prioritize experience. The idea is to increase efficiency for staff and provide a better patient experience. What if, instead of calling the nurse every time, a patient in a hospital could use a digital interface to request another blanket, room temperature change or a different type of food? The patient experience will improve and the nurse can get more time back into their day. Or what if a doctor could report EMR glitches right within the interface and the data was automatically populated so that the IT department no longer had to have a follow-up call on the issue? “This concept around the platform mentality, where they just have to go to a single place and not to multiple systems, creates a simplified experience,” Mr. Koerner said.
Health care providers today are thinner than ever. But digital workflow solutions that use automation can produce better experiences for both patients and clinicians. Digital technologies can help clinicians have more time back in their day to do their primary job: caring for people. Ultimately, this will help improve the quality of work and boost retention.
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