According to healthcare report by Moody’s, shortage of nurses and other workers will directly impact the healthcare financial graphs throughout 2022. The staffing shortage swirl will suck down effective patient care and could drain a large pool of revenue.
The imperative need to improve on several aspects of staffing policies and aid in smooth influx of new staff can help the healthcare institutions go a long way amid staffing crisis in healthcare. Apart from primary staff, being afflicted by the shortage situation, lot of processes feel the direct impact of the same resulting in revenue drainage.
“83% of healthcare professionals say that they’ve had a staff member leave their practice in the last year.”
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that more than 275,000 additional nurses are needed from 2020 to 2030. Employment opportunities for nurses are projected to grow at a faster rate (9%) than all other occupations from 2016 through 2026.
The nursing shortage has degrading effects on delivering stellar patient care as the nurse to patient ratios will see a sharp dip resulting in burnout and subsequently higher rates of resignations. The scenario sees worse effects in emergency departments, ICUs, admission wards leading to dire conditions like delays in delivering care and getting hospital beds.
“According to McKinsey’s research released earlier this year, an alarming three out of 10 nurses are considering leaving their current roles, and only one-third of those intend to take another position at the bedside.”
COVID-19 threw some curve balls and have affected healthcare providers significantly by placing their resilience and dedication to test. Undoubtedly, patients suffer the most midst all uncertain situations, whether poor attentive care, shortage of bed, longer waiting time, healthcare workers shortage or overworked healthcare providers.
And the situation worsens when the revenue cycle is messed with mounting insurance claims and A/Rs lower turnaround times. Outsourcing some operations will relieve the providers of less pressing issues and stay updated about the latest happenings and regulations.
Let’s address two important questions.
How IT can help in combating the staffing shortage?
Patient coordination is important when complicated procedures are involved, and IT enabled automation will save lot of time and energy. With staff shortages, when a patient has to be readmitted because they were not treated properly in the first place diminishes the patient outcomes and care resulting in higher percentages of patients with complications coming back frequently.
“97% of small healthcare businesses say delivering good patient experiences requires the right tools or technology, yet only 27% have invested in these tools for employees to do their jobs.”
IT can help by making a strong visibility across organizations and connecting them so as to streamline the processes and operations without overloading patients at one place and check for places available with spare staff. This will increase the efficiency in patient care and maintain a balanced load across different organizations.
Take the example of Arizona Surge Line, where Arizona Department of Health Services worked towards creating a statewide patient load balancing system to ensure that no hospital would be overloaded when other hospitals had empty beds during handling COVID-19 patients. To implement it, real time visibility into bed capacity, availability of ventilators and other metrics was required across the state hospitals to manage the patient transfers.
With this initiative they were able to reroute the patients to other areas where beds and staff were available and maintain the balance across the state. Technology can play a gravitating effect in pulling solutions to deliver effective patient care and setting up standard procedures to be followed while dealing with large influx of patient count.
How can Outsourcing help the revenue department from facing the heat?
Imagine the loss of revenue because your insurance claims are filed incorrectly, and denial rate is mounting. Expert teams can pull you out from this situation if you believe in the power of outsourcing operations that will lead to growth of revenue streams, overheads reduction, increased efficiency, and decreased in-house maintenance costs.
Healthcare providers can benefit and adapt to the shifting business environment and consumer demands with aid of outsourcing providers. Through this arrangement, they are able to supplement their on-site team with an offshore workforce, utilizing the untapped global talent pool and addressing skill shortage issues that are a common problem with relative simplicity.
Based on the demands of the market and the company, the offshore staff can be grown up or down, giving enterprises more operating freedom. Businesses can proactively address skill shortages and develop a flexible talent acquisition strategy with assistance of workforce planning and Recruitment Process Outsourcing.
Digitization will help optimizing business and recruitment processes and combat the labor shortage by integrating new tools and technologies for implementing the same. But as it sounds easy, it comes with heavy investment costs and labor recruitment with additional investment on infrastructure and training.
You can avoid this by outsourcing the operations and leverage the existing outsourcing providers knowledge and expertise in managing workforce equipped with skills, latest technologies and infrastructure.
According to Weave study, “Staffing shortages are directly impacting the ability for small healthcare practices to keep up with heightened patient expectations for care and communication. By turning to technology to help fill the gap, healthcare professionals can use their time to improve the experience within their practice.”
With outsourcing your medical billing operations, you stand immune against challenges such as maintaining a separate workforce for handling the revenue processes, skill enrichment challenges, infrastructure costs, and at a pinch for situations of dealing with claim reimbursements and medical coding for effective claim filing.
About QWay Healthcare Inc., QWay Healthcare specializes in providing RCM outsourcing with excellent teams focused on higher rates of A/Rs and medical billing back office operations with skilled and trained staff. Get in touch with us to know more about revenue management.