The following is a guest article by Patrick Hunt, MD, is a practicing emergency physician and the Chief Medical Officer at QGenda.
Workforce optimization has suddenly become an everyday necessity in healthcare organizations. The concept has always been a best-practice ideal, of course. Still, the sharp increase in provider burnout and resignations lately has made workforce retention and optimization an essential part of patient care.
To put the matter into context, a study led by the American Medical Association suggests that one out of every five doctors and two out of every five nurses plan to leave their practice within two years due to stressors such as burnout, anxiety, depression, and workload. Patients already wait an average of 24 days for an appointment. How much more will that wait time rise if providers continue to leave their organizations—or abandon medicine altogether?
We owe it to both patients and providers to optimize provider operations to improve providers’ work/life balance and increase patients’ access to care. But that demands complete visibility into workflows ranging from provider onboarding to compensation management. With the ability to view and understand workforce trend data holistically—including patterns in staffing, overtime, and room usage—such optimization is possible.
Optimization requires visibility
Provider operations comprises a wide range of workflows aimed at effectively deploying physicians, nurses, and other staff. Chief among them are onboarding, credentialing, scheduling, compensation, and capacity management.
Unfortunately, vital data about each of these processes usually resides in disparate technology systems that aren’t connected. As a result, healthcare organizations lack visibility into their entire network of providers—including their skill sets, status, and availability to deliver patient care. For instance, aligning staff coverage with patient volumes requires real-time insight into which providers are scheduled, the care they’re credentialed and contracted to provide, and the rooms available for their use. Any opacity hinders truly informed, data-driven decision-making.
By contrast, healthcare organizations can open a central line of sight into resource utilization by integrating traditionally disparate systems—such as provider scheduling with room capacity. This can give department leaders the data needed to analyze trends, staffing, and utilization across the health system. Combining this intelligence with key systems, including the electronic health record (EHR), human resources information system (HRIS), and revenue cycle management (RCM) systems, can help streamline multiple workflows to reduce provider burnout and increase patient access.
Platform approach drives enterprise efficiency
Connecting a whole host of provider operations systems doesn’t need to be as challenging as it may sound. A cloud-based platform approach allows health systems to obtain a comprehensive view of providers across the enterprise.
Merging credentialing, onboarding, payer enrollment, and scheduling processes, for example, enables healthcare organizations to ensure that providers are scheduled as soon as they’ve completed all the necessary prerequisites—but not a moment before—to reduce risk while enhancing patients’ access to care.
Bringing together provider credentialing, scheduling, time tracking, compensation management, capacity, and workforce analytics into a central platform ensures accurate, up-to-date provider information feeds into other solutions, including the EHR, HRIS, and RCM. The benefits of a provider operations platform approach also include the ability to:
- Create equitable schedules that weight provider nuances alongside practices’ operational demands to ensure both needs are fulfilled while preventing burnout.
- Improve room utilization, optimize capacity, and increase patient access by joining provider schedules to room schedules.
- Reduce payroll errors and raise physician satisfaction by linking payroll and time-and-attendance systems to contracting and scheduling data.
- Know for sure which providers are on call at any point in time by combining each departments’ provider schedules with on-call schedules.
Alignment improves provider and patient experiences
Non-optimized provider workflows increase the amount of time providers spend on administrative tasks like scheduling, giving them less time to spend with patients. The net/net is provider dissatisfaction, stress, and burnout alongside patient access challenges.
However, healthcare organizations that adopt a provider operations platform approach can achieve holistic visibility into the full network of providers and mitigate many of the underlying issues that contribute to burnout and patient care delays. With workforce analytics enabling data-driven staffing decisions, healthcare organizations can better align coverage with demand to improve the provider and patient experiences.
