Jan 3
2024
Digital Technologies Provide Solution To American Healthcare Crisis
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.