Electronic Health Reporter

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.

Talent Distribution

Through the help of telemedicine, technology allows nurses to focus on their areas of expertise. Nurses handle indoor settings which are comfortable with their background and settings. Rather than staying in one location while performing minimal nursing activities, talent distribution helps create a balance where none existed.

How Technology Speeds the Recruitment and Retaining of Competent Nurses

With the notable virtual presence that everyone creates, technology makes it possible for the healthcare system to keep track of all potential candidates. This eases the recruitment process by establishing fast and reliable background checks through trusted third-party systems. For instance, with help from third parties, many nursing applicants access the application process within the first few minutes. 

Ideally, through trusted third-party systems, the same technology can also highlight the surplus populations and compare them with areas needing nurses to help open healthcare job opportunities in the latter locations. The recruitment is the easy part; the difficulty comes with retaining a qualified workforce. Electronic scheduling is perfect for boosting staff availability in the overall workforce, but it is not enough to keep all the hired nurses. The best way to ensure that all hired nurses retain their current positions is to revamp the whole nursing admission process by ensuring that the system comes up with new questions to improve patient care and outcome every year.

How Has Technology Benefited the Nursing Shortage Solutions?

Technology has helped minimize the costs involved in improving patient care and outcomes. The prevalence of quality care necessitates the injection of unforeseen but crucial medical expenses that would have otherwise proven difficult or impossible if it were not for technology like scheduling software.

Endless healthcare resources that would have been wasted in the absence of technology can now redirect to where they are needed most. It is already clear that while one state might face nursing shortages, the other may be struggling with a surplus population of the same professionals.

The attraction of vital talent comes in handy during the recruitment process to prevent wasting time training beginners or semi-skilled healthcare workers. It is not uncommon to witness unskilled but willing nursing volunteers in other third-world countries because of nurses’ shortages.

Key Takeaway

Some healthcare providers hear technology, and they freak out because of fears such as breaching patients’ records and other electronic health records fraud. However, technology is not all that, especially when span serves the right purpose. When fully embraced, technology can fix the ultimate nursing shortage that the health system is currently facing and is bound to face in the future if things do not change now.