The primary goal of healthcare organizations is to deliver the best outcomes for patients but delivering the best patient outcomes doesn’t just depend on medical care. Desirable outcomes are also dependent on the technological sophistication of the healthcare infrastructure that supports clinicians and administrators. Continuing to use outdated technology and personnel management strategies undermine and compromise a healthcare organization’s ability to deliver patient-centric care with optimal healthcare outcomes.
Outdated personnel management strategies, such as paper-based staffing, are inadequate in several ways. For instance, paper-based staffing can’t spot trends or analyze performance (both of which help to eliminate burnout and absenteeism), track patient details (including the level of emotional support that is needed for each patient), automate paperwork and routine tasks that eat at resources and time, or keep information protected from security risk.
However, there are solutions available such as optimized workforce scheduling that eliminate outdated technology and archaic staffing solutions. Centered on the idea of creating a patient-centric health system that enables hospital staff to provide the best care possible, optimized workforce scheduling is the future of workforce management for the healthcare industry.
A recent white paper examines many aspects of the industry including healthcare’s labor challenges— specifically the growth of the patient population versus the decline of caregivers.
“Baby Boomers (born between 1949 and 1964) are expected to have a profound impact on both the demand for care, and the industry’s ability to meet that demand. By 2030, it is projected that 50% of the population will be 65 or older; that translates to patients with more complex needs and an aging clinician population.”
In other words, resources will need to be strategically distributed.
One solution is to use optimized workforce scheduling, which pairs patients to caregivers by reviewing data trends and patient needs to determine how to staff and where resources should be allocated. The rationale behind this is that every patient requires different care. Two nurses can have four patients each, all with similar or varying illnesses, but that doesn’t mean the needs of each patient will be equivalent.
The need to pair patients to caregivers based on data is just one of several examples expressing the need for healthcare organizations to adopt new technologies and personnel management strategies.
For more ways that healthcare organizations can build better efficiencies into their workforce management, read the white paper here.
