Electronic Health Reporter

By Harman Dhawan, founder and CEO, Bikham Healthcare.

The American healthcare system is under enormous strain; plagued by looming physician and nursing shortages that grow more dire every day and bogged down by inefficient and costly administrative processes that account for billions in wasteful spending every year. All this adds up to a healthcare system that is not only ineffectual but also extremely costly.

Healthcare budgets are rising exponentially while more and more pressure is placed upon healthcare workers who are increasingly understaffed and overburdened, leaving hospitals and providers unable to provide their patients with high-quality and accessible care. What has caused this precipitous fall in American healthcare, and how can this trend be reversed?

One of the largest obstacles that healthcare has been unable to overcome is its failure to adopt advancing technologies in its administrative processes. Doctors—already stretched thin—are forced to waste valuable time and resources navigating a tangled and disjointed web of health platforms in order to perform the simplest of administrative tasks.

License renewals and credentialing, processes that should take minutes with the assistance of digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, take months or more to execute. Providers must cross multiple platforms in order to manage, track, and monitor a host of different administrative processes, which cause onboarding delays, credentialing and privileging issues, siloed data management, and slower enrollment processes. This, in turn, reduces the efficiency and efficacy of services provided and increases the cost to both the provider and the patient.

Furthermore, these frustrating and tedious processes not only are responsible for delays that account for hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost monthly revenue, but they also take away from the limited amount of time a physician has to see patients and contribute to increased instances of physician burnout, which further depletes our ranks of healthcare professionals.

There are a number of reasons the healthcare industry has been so slow to implement these technologies, not the least of which has been the overregulation of medical data. While other industries have been able to leverage artificial intelligence and all its capabilities to become more flexible and streamlined, the healthcare industry has been slowed by bureaucratic challenges and oversight committees that have stifled innovation and impeded progress.

As dangerous as too little privacy can be, too much can be equally disastrous for an industry in desperate need of an overhaul. This unwillingness to utilize these groundbreaking technologies has caused the American healthcare system to fall from its previous heights as one of the best and most innovative providers of healthcare in the world to become one of the most inaccessible and unaffordable among developed nations. 

As the healthcare system begins to show cracks under the pressure of physician shortages and its own operational inefficiencies, it is more important than ever to make the best use of the resources and technologies available. By utilizing these digital technologies in order to optimize and accelerate health system administration, these needlessly complicated and time-consuming processes can be brought under the control of a single, unified platform for the purpose of making it faster and easier for doctors and healthcare facilities to navigate.

By establishing a single, comprehensive network for provider management, providers will be able to onboard faster, acquire license verifications and renewals seamlessly, process payer applications and enrollments automatically, and create a centralized hub for provider data that increases workflow efficiency and take proactive steps to manage and solve issues before they arise. This will allow doctors and healthcare providers to spend less time sifting through licensing and credentialing applications and more time caring for patients. 

This is not to say that the only solution to the current predicament of our healthcare system is through the implementation of these technologies, but the only one that can provide immediate relief to many pain points that exist today. By addressing many of the operational inefficiencies in healthcare, we can ensure that our doctors, hospitals and healthcare facilities are able to provide the highest level of care possible given the amount of staff and resources at their disposal.

This will also improve the amount of support that physicians and nurses receive and will enable them to spend more time with their patients and less time buried in applications and enrollments. By addressing our healthcare systems’ most inherent flaws, the industry as a whole will become more streamlined, optimized, and efficient and can restore the American healthcare system to its former place as a beacon of accessibility and innovation.