SOLUTION PROVIDER Q&A Sponsored Content
The future of healthcare staffing: Challenges & Solutions
Dr. Pat Hunt Chief Medical Officer
QGenda
Overall, what does the landscape of staffing in healthcare organizations and medical groups look like right now? The staffing landscape has always been a challenge for healthcare organizations and medical groups. However, in the post-Covid world, things have become even more challenging. Staffing demands a delicate balance to avoid chaos from understaffing or overstaffing. Losing a few providers, nurses, or staff can disrupt the entire system, increasing workload and attrition risk. However, in the last few years, with the massive exodus of health- care providers from the workforce, most facilities are significantly understaffed, especially in several niche specialties. This leads to escalating premium labor spend and emphasizes the immediate need for creative staffing options and enhanced utilization of healthcare teams.
What are the biggest current challenges facing healthcare leaders? The healthcare industry is not unique in facing challenges in the post-Covid world. However, I would argue that healthcare has seen some of the more pronounced and dramatic swings. Ensuring viable staffing at reasonable and sustainable costs, navigating regulatory demands, and persistent insurer negotiations are significant hurdles currently facing healthcare leaders. Healthcare’s slender margins underscore the need for resource-efficient approaches to ensure ongoing success.
On-call staffing is becoming more challenging, as physicians and nurses are in practice for a shorter time, and are either refusing on- call altogether, or resisting accepting it as a routine part of their work lives. What are the possible solutions in that regard? In the past three decades of my healthcare career, I’ve witnessed workforce transformations, just like the pre- ceding 30 years experienced. But embracing change, as difficult as it may be, enhances effectiveness. Previously, providers managed their patients; now,
healthcare is taking a more centralized approach where hospitalists manage a majority of patients and primary care providers routinely prefer not to take call. While this has led to improved work-life balance for providers, it’s also created additional challenges on the healthcare system. It’s imperative that we find a balance of providing adequate coverage for our patients while also respecting
the needs of providers. Finding solutions that create bal- anced and fair schedules is a great first step, in addition to utilizing advanced practice providers to help bridge the gap many health systems experience.
How can information technology be leveraged to improve on-call staffing management? The two biggest challenges with on-call are the creation of the schedule and the efficient and accurate distribution of the schedule. While hand writing or Excel once sufficed for schedule creation and distribution, today’s complex health systems necessitate algorithm-based scheduling. First, let’s cover the creation of the on-call schedule.
There’s simply no way humans can look at all possible schedule combinations in an efficient manner like an algorithm-driven scheduling system can. But a system purpose-built for healthcare can balance the various needs of providers with the needs of the healthcare organization to develop the best possible schedule. The second half of this is providing centralized access
to the schedule, ensuring the right on-call provider is available and contacted on time, every time. Reliable access to accurate schedules improves patient care, access, safety, and outcomes. Additionally, it’s essential for an on-call system to interface with necessary com- munication tools to make it easy for providers to reach out to the individuals they need to contact.
What will this landscape look like a few years from now? Healthcare will always be adapting and changing to the current environment. I don’t anticipate a time where providers will want to go back to working 100 or 120 hour weeks and being on-call every other night. Additionally, while we’re working to improve the number of available positions for providers, I anticipate we’ll still have a sig- nificant shortage for an extended period of time, which requires us to be flexible with our staffing and improve utilization of resources. From a technology standpoint, I think we will continue
to find optimal enterprise-wide solutions that can consis- tently help us to solve these problems. Improved integra- tions among systems will make our scheduling, on-call management, and communications more and more seamless. My hope is that this will allow the healthcare team to focus more on patient care and less on practice management in the years to come.
www.QGenda.com
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