The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the true costs, human and otherwise, of health disparities, as low income and minority populations suffered disproportionately from the virus. Blacks, Native Americans and Hispanics were 2% to 3.3% more likely to be hospitalized or die from the virus compared to non-Hispanic Whites, primarily because of a higher prevalence of underlying disease states (hypertension, obesity and Type II diabetes) caused by relative lack of access to the so-called social determinants of health: good paying jobs, healthy food, safe housing, and transportation, among others.
As with so many aspects of the pandemic, supply chain is front and center in the fight, which is playing out on their home turf, literally. Once again, supply chain is also getting noticed in the executive suite, as the boards of trustees for America’s hospitals prioritize health equity in preparation for taking on more risk for the populations they serve under value-based reimbursement programs. Here are few ways they are making a difference.
1. Bringing Diversity Home
Supply chain professionals have long sought to increase their spend with diverse suppliers, defined primarily as those that are women, minority, veteran, or LBGTQ-owned. That data is tracked and often used to support grant applications. More recently, transparency around that spend is being mandated. In California, for example, Assembly Bill 962 (AB 962) requires all hospitals meeting a certain threshold to report how much they spend with diverse suppliers each year.
But for many health systems, diversity is not enough. They want to make sure they are using their purchasing power to support the health and well-being of local communities where the patients they serve live. Spending in local communities has a multiplier effect. For example, investing in a local business supports job creation; in turn the wages for those employees generate local tax dollars and increase their ability to spend and generate wealth in their own communities.
Approximately 15% of people in North America have some type of communication and hearing disorder. The issue affects people of all ages, but especially in the elderly population, both hearing and communication problems tend to increase. Hearing and speech are both fundamental for good health and can have a significant impact on a person’s quality of life.
Given the prevalence of speech and hearing disorders, it’s no surprise there’s a demand for speech and hearing specialists. Healthcare professionals qualified in this area can help evaluate and screen individuals with hearing and speech problems and assess other associated problems such as difficulty swallowing and lack of balance.
Here is a quick overview of degree programs for people who are interested in pursuing a career in this specialty:
By Mike Pietig, vice president of healthcare experience, Avtex Solutions.
Many healthcare organizations today offer a multichannel engagement approach, presenting online and mobile access to services and even care. Adopting digital channels is a great first step toward meeting your consumers’ expectations, but is just the starting point.
Consumers today expect to be given choice in their healthcare engagement and care channels – via mobile app, on their computer, over the phone, in person – and they want these interactions to feed into a connected, seamless omnichannel experience that is simple, intuitive, and personalized to their needs. Today’s digitally integrated economy requires an approach to healthcare that puts consumers’ needs first and engages them at every relevant touchpoint along their journey.
Many healthcare organizations are turning to a digital front door to facilitate this kind of digitally optimized, omnichannel experience. A digital front door sets the foundation for a stronger, more consistent omnichannel experience that enhances every connection, increases loyalty, reduces friction, and drives competitive advantage.
Our healthcare experience experts have identified the five components needed to build a Digital Front Door strategy that meets consumer expectations and strengthens the omnichannel healthcare experience:
1. Alignment
At Avtex, we often talk about the need to define your “North Star” to ensure that every aspect of the consumer journey aligns with your organizations’ overarching philosophy of the best possible experience. A Digital Front Door ensures there is alignment with this desired healthcare experience, from goals to governance.
Like any successful customer experience strategy, the digital front door must align with and improve upon existing patient and member experience strategies to digitally transform your organization. Activities like journey mapping and CX process mapping can help uncover pain points and clarify how a Digital Front Door plan can support your overall North Star.
2. Understanding
A 360-degree view of your consumers is necessary to build a strong digital experience. Building a complete, holistic understanding of your consumers’ experiences will help you to identify gaps and opportunities to elevate this experience and create a more rounded, consumer-centric environment. For example, you may consider developing a voice of the customer (VOC) program to gain new insights, or you may decide to perform persona mapping exercises to help understand your target segments better so you can better meet their identified needs.
It’s also important to prioritize gathering employee feedback and data, as these insights provide invaluable information on needs, preferences, trends, and pain points – both at the individual and group level. We’ve learned that improving the employee experience will lead to a measurable improvement in the consumer experience.
By Dr. Madhavi Vemireddy, co-founder and COO, CareTribe.
Millions of Americans live with chronic health conditions every day, sometimes even debilitating or disabling health conditions. When our physical health fails, it inadvertently impacts every facet of our lives: social, financial, interpersonal, as well as professional. As a result, millions of Americans are enlisted to support their loved ones struggling with their health each year. Within the healthcare industry, we refer to the former as “family caregivers ” and the latter as “care recipients.”
Today, more than 53 million Americans can be described as family caregivers.
Family caregivers commonly find themselves scrambling to solve problems for their afflicted loved one, often at the expense of their job, their family, and friends, and sometimes even their own physical and/or mental wellbeing. The average American caregiver spends four years or more in the role of a caregiver, spending approximately 24 hours per week dedicated to supporting their loved one with their out-of-pocket spending as a caregiver costing on average more than $7,000 per year.
Unfortunately, caregivers typically find themselves providing this level of care for a loved one with very little expert support. Usually, caregivers tap into their network of friends and family members for advice or assistance. Because of the chronic stress that the role of caregiving brings, caregivers are twice as likely to suffer from adverse health effects like depression, hypertension, diabetes, pulmonary disease, and other ailments–all while carrying the responsibility of caregiving for their loved one.
Creating a Community Centered on Caregiving
These reasons are why my husband and I founded CareTribe to support the millions of Americans struggling to support their loved ones who are afflicted with chronic health conditions, the ramifications of those conditions, and the impact they hold on the overall quality of life for both care recipients and caregivers alike.
In creating CareTribe, our mission was to provide family caregivers with an innovative technology platform driven by artificial intelligence (AI) that combines condition specific pathways, relevant benefits, curated products and resources, and human experts to provide personalized support, regardless of what stage caregivers are at in their journey to assist their loved ones.
One of the greatest health concerns of modern society is nursing shortages in different states across the world. The prevalence and impacts of the recent Covid-19 pandemic have taught the world that professional nurses and physicians are pertinent to providing quality healthcare services. As the pandemic continued to expand, it became evident that frontline nurses suffered the most, causing an unpredictable shortage of professional healthcare workers at such a poor timing in history. Predictions indicate that by 2030, there will be a shortage of more than 50,000 nurses in certain states.
This trend explains why nursing programs and professionals embrace technology to help in the ideal recruitment, retaining, and monitoring process. Here is how technology helps to counter nurses’ shortages in the healthcare system.
Specialty Preference Over Facility
Gone are the days when nursing and other healthcare job vacancies filled the print media pages. Around a decade ago, influential healthcare policymakers decided that the system would evolve from print journals, specialty publications, and newspapers to social media, website optimization, and email marketing. This strategy would facilitate analytical and metrical monitoring to promote nursing by specialty rather than a facility.
Electronic Scheduling
Many nursing training processes take place virtually. Several nurses get assigned to different shifts based on their competence skills and preference areas. Electronic scheduling helps solve the nursing shortage challenge by facilitating trading shifts among professional healthcare workers and establishing a stable balance between work and personal lives.
3d rendering medical interface with robot hand holding stethoscope
Hospitals have always been a place of innovation. From the first medical breakthroughs to new technologies, hospitals are constantly changing and adapting to meet today’s needs. As a result, doctors need better tools, more efficient systems, and faster access to information to provide quality care for their patients. This blog post will explore some of the most innovative technological advances in hospitals that are making healthcare more efficient than ever before.
The Artificial Intelligence Intrusive Surgery Machines
Artificial Intelligence has been making its way into the operating room for some time now. These machines make surgeons work smarter, not more complex, and may eventually replace the current surgical team with a single AI-enabled device.
The use of AI in surgery will only grow as these devices become more sophisticated, and physicians across specialties like cardiothoracic surgery, vascular intervention, or even neurological procedures can use them in operations such as deep brain stimulation.
Artificial intelligence will also bring new efficiencies in hospital operations providing data insights that lead to cost savings from reduced wait times. This step will be through better planning capabilities, fewer bed shortages through enhanced inventory management, and lower overhead costs due to decreased staffing needs, among other benefits.
The efficiency increases will also extend to the patients themselves, who will spend more time with their loved ones because of shorter wait times, a better quality of life, and experience less pain due to AI-assisted surgery.
Hospitals are using artificial intelligence to automate various tasks, such as triaging incoming patient charts based on severity. In some cases, AI is even being used to decide what course of treatment will be best for the patient in question.
Employment in healthcare occupations is projected to grow 15% over the next few years, adding nearly 2.4 million jobs. Yet, there is no end in sight to the nation-wide healthcare hiring crisis, especially among the majority of workers that are underpaid and undervalued. While understaffing can be a nuisance and result in lost earnings for those in sectors such as hospitality, it’s consequences can have catastrophic effects in healthcare.
What do you do when you can’t provide critical care in a timely manner? Many healthcare providers are facing this issue as the industry needs thousands of additional professionals to keep up with current and future demand.
What’s driving the crisis
To understand why the shortage is occurring, we need to understand the challenges many healthcare professionals face. Burnout is real – a recent poll by the Washington Post indicates nearly 30% of workers are considering leaving the profession as they seek a better work/life balance. Personal protective equipment (PPE) crucial for the safety and wellbeing of our healthcare workers is still widely unavailable for many small and mid-sized clinics. And they’re underpaid, too – Last year, nursing assistants made a median salary of $30,000, and medical assistants, home health aides and others averaged only $13.48 per hour (less than $30,000 per year). Finally, there’s a limited supply of medica professionals in general. As of now, the United States has a greater number of citizens over the age of 65 than ever before. Additionally, over the next ten years, 20% of the United States will become senior citizens. Add to that the training time needed to work in healthcare and you see a mismatch between the jobs that need to be filled and the skills available workers possess.
Healthcare leaders need to think outside the box to stem the tide of those workplace attrition. To get the top healthcare talent (and keep them), you need to answer two questions: how am I treating my employees and how am I treating my patients? Everyone wants to make good money, and while that’s an important factor, it’s not only about compensation.
The growing preference for outpatient orthopedic surgery is much more than another pandemic-inspired trend. Recent advances in medicine over the past few years have made procedures, even those as intensive as total joint replacements (TJR), safe to conduct in the outpatient or ASC setting.
Now, surgeons can capitalize on regional anesthesia and tranexamic acid to minimize blood loss and GPS software to improve the precision of implant positioning, all factors which ensure the patient can recover comfortably in their own home, not the hospital.
While these advances make outpatient TJR procedures possible, the digital transformation in healthcare makes it preferable. Specialty-specific digital tools are crucial for the transition to outpatient surgery, reducing the burden on physicians, limiting a patient’s time spent out of the home, and lowering costs for both patients and physicians.
Physician
As has been widely reported, inefficient electronic health record software can intensify burnout instead of mitigating it. Physicians that spend extensive time documenting, especially after hours, report higher rates of burnout, and programs that are click-intensive and data-heavy contribute to this phenomenon as well.
These pitfalls are especially burdensome in the ASC setting because it is a site of care that may be separate from a patient’s primary care office or hospital system. In order to best understand a patient’s medical history and effectively communicate with their other physicians and specialists, ASCs need interoperable EHR systems that minimize manual data entry.
EHR adoption is already especially challenging within orthopedics, as this is a specialty that covers a wide age range, from children to older adults, and encompasses integumentary, neurovascular, and musculoskeletal systems across the entire body. Therefore, on top of the challenges of finding software that mimics the workflow of outpatient care, it must also capture the nuances of the orthopedic specialty. It should streamline workflows and predict and suggest codes, reducing overall clicks and time spent within the system, so that the physician can dedicate that time to the patient.
By Brian Radin, president, 