According to a new survey from enterprise healthcare operations software company symplr, healthcare leaders are listing workforce pressures as the top organizational threat over the next year. It’s not surprising to see these types of concerns topping the list and if anything, the surprise may be that it took this long. Even here on Extract’s HealthyData blog, burnout and staffing issues are topics that we have covered for years.
Despite these longstanding concerns, the biggest threat was previously identified as financial challenges. Finances didn’t suddenly leave the minds of executives as it ranked second, with 39% of respondents identifying it as the top threat compared to 41% for staffing concerns. Even though people didn’t all pick burnout as their top threat, they uniformly reported having challenges recruiting nurses from the outside, retaining nurses, and dealing with associated staffing fallouts (97%, 96%, and 97%, respectively).
Part of the reason for this is that while burnout and staffing shortages have shown no signs of abating, hospitals are starting to see some pressure ease on the financial side. Median year-to-date operating margins have stabilized and been on a slow and steady march back toward historical levels. The other threats listed included regulatory compliance, the payer dynamics of value-based care, cybersecurity, data accuracy, and lack of interoperability.
Survey respondents overwhelmingly (84%) agreed that a good way of recapturing clinician’s time is by consolidating operations software. They say clinicians would be able to devote 10% more time to clinical care weekly with consolidated software. It’s intuitive, spending time moving from system to system is less efficient than the alternative.
Rather than just focusing on which piece of technology someone is using, it’s often wise to take a step back to examine the task itself. It’s important to consider how you’re completing a task, who is completing a task, and whether it even needs to be done at all.
Take, for example, an activity that’s crucial to providing the best patient care, entering data and documentation. This isn’t a task that can be eliminated entirely, but steps in the process certainly can be removed or reassigned. Some of our customers used to have nurses put a barcode on every document to ensure it is correctly delivered to the patient’s record and document management system. Here, it would be great to have nurses working at the top of their licensure rather than applying stickers, but even better would be eliminating barcoding entirely.
An automated document handling solution can match documents to the proper patient, order, encounter, and destination in the EMR, DMS, LIS, or anywhere else without the need for any human intervention. Advanced OCR and natural language processing tools can determine what data you want identified on a document based on its type and deliver that information using your naming conventions.
Implementing data extraction software allows your organization to be more resilient to shifts in document volume, deliver better and more complete data downstream, and lets your staff work at the skill level you hired them for.
Please reach out if you’d like to learn more about how Extract’s software can ease some of the pressures of burnout and staffing.
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.