Productivity is a topic that never strays too far from headlines when discussing American business. Whether it’s national aggregate statistics or just an organization’s internal statistics, there’s always an eye for growth and doing more with less.
While increased efficiency is a goal that we’re all striving toward, in the healthcare industry it’s becoming a necessity as headlines about burnout and retention dominate the news. A recent survey of 86 hospital and health system leaders from Kaufman Hall indicates that almost all of them are implementing a variety of incentives to manage their workforce, with a focus on money:
Raising starting salary or minimum wage (98% of respondents)
Signing bonuses (84%)
Increasing remote/hybrid work schedules (76%)
Retention bonuses (73%)
More than 20% of the respondents reported turning to outsourcing for roles in IT operations, environmental services, and revenue cycle operations. Finding and keeping staff, whether locally or abroad, hasn’t been the only move in healthcare as 46% of respondents said they were making modest investments in automation. An admittedly small 16% said that their automation investments were significant.
While we’d like to see that 16% number increase, Extract is part of the 46%, a modest investment in automation. We like to think we represent a modest investment in productivity as well.
Our software doesn’t make headlines when we sign a new client because it’s not the type of investment associated with installing an Epic or OnBase. It’s also not the type of software that requires an executive to justify the purchase to shareholders or the press as our software has paid for itself and then some at every healthcare institution where we’ve implemented.
When it comes to getting clinical data from incoming documents into the EMR, we don’t want you to eliminate the staff doing the job, and we don’t want you to outsource the work either. After all, it’s your staff, that you hired for a reason. These are the people who know your organization, your patients, your documents, and your policies.
We’ve found that no matter whether you’re working with HIM, transplant, accounts payable, oncology, wherever you have staff manually entering data (or worse yet, manually sending image files to the black hole of the media tab), when they’re using our HealthyData Platform, they do it twice as fast with fewer errors.
Sure, this does mean that you’ll need fewer people to perform data entry because those doing it will be much more efficient as documents will already be identified, patients/orders/encounters are matched, and almost all of the data they’re looking for will be prepopulated.
What this affords the healthcare institutions we work with is not just cost savings, but flexibility. Attrition and volume spikes become manageable tasks rather than disruptive disasters. Employees with ambitions outside of data entry tasks can be reassigned to make better use of their talents.
If you’re interested in productivity and automation, we’ve got a webinar that’s a perfect fit for you. The Fall 2022 HealthyData Virtual Academy will be taking place this Tuesday, November 1st at 10:00 am central time. We’re offering an AHIMA-approved CEU credit for attending and will feature a presentation on productivity improvements you can implement in your work today along with an overview of Extract’s automated routing software, Sort & Send.
Click here to access our HDVA landing page.
About the Author: Chris Mack
Chris is a Marketing Manager at Extract with experience in product development, data analysis, and both traditional and digital marketing. Chris received his bachelor’s degree in English from Bucknell University and has an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. A passionate marketer, Chris strives to make complex ideas more accessible to those around him in a compelling way.