Assessing and Addressing Headcount and Hiring

The beginning of the year is a good time to think about how you’ll staff for your 2022 objectives.  For most organizations, you can start with the assumption that you will be shorthanded.  The job market is tight everywhere, especially in healthcare where the reoccurring waves of COVID no longer impact only frontline staff.  Everyone is impacted.

Because of COVID:

• workers have decided to leave the job market

• healthcare organizations have shifted staff to work from home

• managing remote staff creates a new set of management issues

• staffing costs are rising

• productivity has been negatively affected (thankfully, far less than many managers feared going into work from home… I was a big skeptic but now see the work is getting done)

• project work, like the implementation Extract is doing for a large Bay Area health system, has been paused because it is an all-hands-on deck response to the Omicron variant

More than ever before, prospective customers quietly complain about their incoming documentation backlogs.  I say quietly because they are embarrassed to tell us how large their backlogs are and they seem almost paralyzed, not just by the enormity of the problem but also by the lack of human capital available to help solve the problem.  They certainly understand the risk their data/document backlog has created for their patients and struggle with the possibility that a patient will have bad outcome because critical clinical data is not getting to the EMR fast enough.

It is frustrating for Extract too.  We have plenty of benchmark data across our customer base regarding the positive impact HealthyData™ and LabDE™ have on the number of employees required to handle a workflow.  With our analytics dashboard, managers have all the data they need to manage day to day issues but also to plan for the coming year.  Managers know how many people will be required and can plan for hiring and training.  Extract’s solutions move documentation faster and cheaper.

Chicken or the egg

How often have you heard someone say, “I am too busy to hire and train a new employee?”  Obviously, viewed from the long term, this is bad logic.  Nevertheless, managers are forced to put off workflow advancements because COVID has overrun their community and their hospitals, and as it should be, every available resource is refocused on patients.  It is not just a human resource crunch.  There can also be a funding crunch as money is diverted to COVID remediation.  As bad as the backlog might be, managers simply don’t have the resources to implement the improvements that will eliminate the problem.

It is a safe bet that COVID is here to stay.  That means we need to create strategies to overcome the challenges mentioned above.  Technology and automation are top of list alternatives.  Automated workflows will reduce the number of employees required to handle the growing number of documents and data coming into the organization.  Fewer employees mean less cost and less management headaches.  Software automation will also reduce human related data errors.  Backfiles of data entry will be eliminated and that means physicians will receive critical clinical data faster and they will be able to diagnose and treat patients fast and better.

If you are planning for a better 2022, reach out to Extract Systems.  Extract automates document and data entry workflows including laboratory test result abstraction, health information management (scanning and indexing), referral patients and even accounts payable.