I recently attended the Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) Digital Health Leadership Summit, which brought together experts to address some of the current challenges and opportunities for digitally transforming healthcare. One striking theme that came up repeatedly during the event and across all industry segments, from healthcare providers to pharmacies to long-term care facilities, was the critical shortage of workers, a situation that has been growing for years and accelerated by the pandemic.
This staffing shortage not only presents challenges in the quality, safety, and efficiency of patient care, but also leads to stress and burnout, taking a physical and mental toll on those still working. Among the most severe issues:
- Exodus of nursing staff, many of whom have left the field due to current working conditions or who are at retirement age. According to the National Nursing Workforce Study, the median age of a registered nurse in the U.S. is 52. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the our healthcare system will have to fill nearly 200,000 open nursing positions every year until 2030 to keep up with demand.
- Pharmacies are also experiencing a departure of workers, most notably pharmacy techs who make a median wage of just $16.87 per hour. Staff shortages are overburdening the workers who remain, creating delays in filling prescriptions and causing medication errors. Some pharmacies are even being forced to reduce their hours to contend with fewer staff.
Another critical problem that could be on the horizon is a federal minimum staffing requirement for nursing homes proposed by the Biden administration with the aim of ensuring better quality of care. However, with the worker shortage, such a mandate could create operational challenges for many long-term care facilities.
Need for Greater Automation in Healthcare
One way to address the dire shortage in healthcare staff is the implementation of technologies that can automate many of the manual processes traditionally performed by people. As articulated at the summit, automation across the healthcare continuum is key in helping close the current gaps in care, but it must be made easier to incorporate it at multiple points along workflows.
Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) is an automation technology that was detailed in this previous blog post. A cousin of telehealth, RPM can assist in the daily management of chronic diseases by remotely collecting real-time patient health data such as weight, heart rate, blood pressure, and more. Such capabilities can reduce phone calls between patients and care staff, as well as cut down on in-office visits while improving medical outcomes. Carabiner client Health Wealth Safe is one provider of RPM technology that is currently in use by physician offices to monitor thousands of patients.
Our client CoverMyMeds automates prior authorization workflow across stakeholders—from provider to payer to pharmacy—making it faster and easier to initiate and track requests, eliminating the labyrinth of phone calls, emails, and faxes administrative workers have traditionally made to get patients their needed medications.
These are just two examples of technologies with the ability to offset some of the burden associated with the growing scarcity of healthcare workers. In many cases, one of the barriers to implementation is that healthcare organizations simply don’t know such automation exists, or do not have confidence in doing things differently from “the way things have always been done.” As marketers, the goal of my team is to create awareness for such solutions and educate decision makers on their advantages.
Worker shortages created in part by the Great Resignation, pandemic overwork, and other aforementioned factors impact not just healthcare provider organizations but all of us who depend on them for our own care and the care of our loved ones. For this reason, there are few things more important than finding ways to ensure the “health” of our healthcare industry, and greater automation is a good starting point for addressing some of its current woes.