#3 Effective Solutions to the Healthcare Staffing Shortage

New attractions and innovations in the healthcare ecosystem demand more people to join the force. Especially the US, which as usual owns a seat at the top row of the largest employers in the sector. 

The healthcare spectrum provides a bright future with opportunities for whoever enters the field. But the staff available to cover all the real-time happenings is only a few and spiking up the number is not that easy.

How Can The Healthcare Staffing Shortage Situation Be Addressed?

Healthcare is only going to see an upward spike in business at least up to the 2030s & 40s unless is hit hard by another unfortunate event. With the widening of the sector will be affected by the current and future shortage of staff. This should be addressed immediately in a year so that patient safety will not be compromised in the future.

The years 2020 to 2022 taught us the extreme impacts of healthcare staff shortage at its worst. The Association of American Medical Colleges predicted that by 2034, the industry could be short as many as 124,000 physicians. This shortage is not for nurses & physicians alone. It will also include people from service workers and lab technicians to paramedics. 

This pushes the existing staff to overwork, stress, and suffer burnout. Recruiting new people alone wouldn’t manage the situation. The healthcare system needs to improve its operations for attracting newbies.

To achieve that, the influencers must find the problems and deploy appropriate technology to remove stress and burnout. This can be done by automating high-volume tasks so that they can refocus on patient care, improving patient experience. Here is how healthcare professionals can achieve them.

1. Reduce errors with healthcare technology

• Medical errors from staff are the major side effect of extra work, overwork, stress, and burnout. 
• Staff shortages push workers to work for longer hours and lead to legal, dangerous, and costly medical complications. 
• Record keeping & documentation are the best examples. This involves time-consuming, complicated data entities by staff.

Solution: 

• If your facility is being affected by this problem, implementing a modern-day cloud-based Electronic Health Record can solve this. 
• EHRs come with voice transcription and other automated features. 
• This helps you streamline your clinical operations and improve communication with patients. 
• Cloud-based EHRs can increase data security and patient safety.

2. Increase patient experience

• Patient experience is very vital for clinical development and it affects operations from scheduling to payment and follow-ups.
• Shortage in staff leads to poor handling of patients, thus affecting their experience.
• Handling patients with limited staff can lead to stress and burnout, which in turn can cause chaos between the staff and the patients. 

Solution:

• Automation can increase patient experience by decreasing staff stress.
• Tools like the Vozo patient portal help patients to finish their personal & clinical paperwork via an online portal or mobile app.
• This decreases errors & overwork for staff and ensures the integrity of health information.
• Choose portals that allow patients to handle prescription refills, schedule appointments, and more. This reduces staff burnout.

3. Make onboarding & training easier with health techs

• People are colliding with facilities even from far regions. Recruiting and training them in one place manually is impossible now.
• Manual & traditional onboarding involves many staffs and in the situation of staff shortage, it may not be perfect.

Solution:

• Implementing digital quick onboarding solutions makes onboarding easier now.
• This allows employees to learn in real time from wherever they are.
• This improves employee satisfaction thus resulting in good productivity from their side.
• Allows the staff to use their free time effectively to improve their knowledge, career, and perspectives.

Final Thought

New technologies and automation can eradicate errors from manual processes. This helps healthcare organizations to improve operations. This reduces work overload for staff and increases their production level by reducing stress and burnout. This will also help to manage the healthcare staffing shortage.

Modern technology enhances patient experience thus allowing facilities to attract and keep them. This will happen only once the entire industry joins together and commits to greater change. This will help providers satisfy future generations.

“Join us in the journey to reduce staff burnout & manage their shortage”