Healthcare organizations face increasingly complex operational challenges as they navigate ever-evolving internal and external controls while also striving to ensure quality patient care.
Leaders are seeking solutions to balance administrative imperatives, such as nurse/staff scheduling and safety/ event reporting, without placing unnecessary burden on nurses and staff members — particularly when burnout, attrition and widespread workforce shortages are at all-time highs.
During Becker's Hospital Review's 13th Annual Meeting, RLDatix Chief Clinical and Services Officer, Inge Garrison, RN, moderated a roundtable discussion with healthcare leaders from across the country. Together, they explored pain points and discussed solutions for these challenges and how the organizations can not only cope — but thrive.
Here are the top three takeaways:
Provider organizations must adopt an integrated approach to managing operations.
Given the sheer amount of work that it takes to keep hospitals up and running, it’s not uncommon that different functions become somewhat siloed. However, taking a “big picture” approach to healthcare administration can help organizations think systematically while also addressing the individual facets and responsibilities required for successful operations. For example, creating formal governance structures and leveraging specialized software to facilitate administrative processes like staff credentialing, onboarding, contract management and revenue management can help foster more streamlined patient and provider lifecycle management by bringing data “online,” reducing administrative waste and ensuring everyone is working from the same points of reference.
This approach can also extend beyond the back office by integrating technologies to support safety through event analysis and reporting, patient experience, peer review, peer support and clinical surveillance — as well as compliance-related functions, such as accreditation, regulatory position, policy management, documentation archiving and migration. When health systems build quality, risk and compliance controls into their everyday processes, they can reduce the administrative burden of these tasks while simultaneously staying ahead of potential issues. This ultimately allows organizations to be more dynamic in the face of constant change and growing complexity and take material steps toward delivering better, safer care.
Workforce management is critical for effectively adapting to complexity in healthcare.
In the current environment, health systems often use a combination of call alerts for just-in-time vacancies and "warm" touches (such as phone calls) to help motivate nurses to pick up shifts or migrate to departments with acute staffing needs. "The front-line manager's job is the hardest job in the building." Garrison said, addressing these often arduous and time-consuming tasks.
Garrison then went on to highlight the importance of leveraging technology and developing a process for data-driven scheduling to foster fairness, improve safety, realize value and strategically deploy staff based on the areas of greatest patient need. As one participant observed, "The ability to use predictive scheduling can help us look weeks ahead so that we don´t have to scramble."
Organizations must leverage technology to reduce the administrative burden placed on healthcare workers.
Administrative tasks are often a necessary part of healthcare, both to ensure patient safety and organizational compliance, as well as to mitigate the impact of (and learn from) adverse events. However, in addressing these requirements, organizations often build cumbersome processes that can contribute to the ongoing epidemic of administrative harm, sidetracking highly skilled bedside professionals from their core responsibilities. As one attendee noted, “"We have to stop developing additional widgets where people have to get into one more system and click on more and more [things].”
Without the right culture in place, inefficiencies or poor communication can introduce elements of "blame and shame" — often reducing the effectiveness of patient safety efforts and contributing to burnout or workplace hostility. Without the right systems, people and processes to support that culture, organizations will always be one step behind. As the healthcare industry seeks to move forward, effectively aligning systems, structures and staff is paramount to success.
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