Can Data Analytics Rescue Hospitals from a Healthcare Workforce Crisis?

The following is a guest article by Rich Kenny, MMCi, RN, Healthcare Industry Executive Advisor at SAS.

Nurses are the backbone of the healthcare delivery system – the 28 million nurses around the world make up 59% of healthcare professionals. If your organization employs nurses, it is a particularly challenging time as the worldwide pandemic has exacerbated a labyrinth of chronic challenges and nursing shortages are raging across the industry as fast and fierce as the California wildfires. Consider this: 17% of nurses are expected to retire within the next ten years (almost a fifth of the workforce). Now, amid the COVID crisis, many countries are reporting a whopping 25-30% of their nurses intend to leave the profession altogether within the next year.

The impact already is spilling over to hospital operations, forcing bed closures and accelerating burnout as more and more pressures are being placed on nurses to shoulder the demands. Nursing shortages are concerning enough that the American Nurses Association recently urged, in a letter to DHHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, that this be declared a national emergency, citing “long-term repercussions for the profession, the entire health care delivery system, and ultimately, on the health of the nation.”

And just last month, the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce held a hearing to discuss multiple pieces of legislation aimed at broad investments and support for the healthcare workforce, including resources to recruit and retain talented health professionals and to protect their mental well-being going forward.

The right instruments to navigate the storm

Right now, healthcare leaders are navigating a proverbial storm with lives at stake, nurses calling out for help and communities in jeopardy of quality care if nurses leave. Amidst this crisis and uncertainty, how can hospitals and healthcare organizations maintain and even grow operational capacity, while serving their clinical workforce still recovering from the most demanding time of their careers?

This storm is too dangerous to navigate by sight. The aviation world differentiates visual flight rules (VFR) and instrument flight rules (IFR). The latter requires special tools and training. Before this current storm, healthcare organizations could pilot using only VFR – guided by single data source systems, simple metrics and innovative ideas. However, now healthcare leaders must use IFR and they don’t have the instruments, or tools, they need to safely navigate through this storm.

Policy changes like those being discussed at the federal level won’t clear the skies overnight. Here are 4 actions healthcare organizations can take now:

1. Start with the data

In a 2020 State of the World’s Nursing report, the World Health Organization urged countries to strengthen capacity for health workforce data collection, analysis and use. Historically, much of the focus on healthcare data has centered on patient data, and rightly so. However, much can be gained to address the Quadruple Aim through a clear understanding of the costliest component of a healthcare delivery system – the people. What data is your organization managing on behalf of the workforce with which you’ve been entrusted?

Most HR systems report and dashboard on single-source data with no integration into other operational systems. HR data, time and attendance data, survey data, exit interview data, email activity data, EMR metadata, and even third-party data such as social media and other third-party municipality and geographic data are all important to a holistic understanding of your workforce. Keeping with the helicopter analogy, even if the GPS mapping display can determine location and plot the course, that alone is insufficient to fly.

Inventory the data collected and investigate opportunities to integrate them. It’s often the intersections of these data where insights are found. Even if choosing to stick with single-source HR data, talk to front-line managers about what they need. Many are flying completely blind where even HR data is difficult for them to view.

2. Tear a page from your CX strategy

Marketing departments know how critical customer experience is to generating brand loyalty.  At the risk of oversimplifying, that’s what this boils down to: how do we create loyal workforces?

It’s worth a reminder that loyalty is a two-way street, but it helps to know what’s important to customers and employees and design around that. This is where personas (fictional characters that represent specific audience segments) come into play. Personas are a human-centered design technique that provide a “personification” of the quantitative data gathered for that particular segment to foster empathy when designing for it.

However rarely, if ever, do healthcare organizations create personas of their workforce. When dealing with and understanding such a complex, multi-generational workforce, healthcare leaders must be able to put themselves in a nurse’s shoes.

3. Mobilize leaders with actionable insights

Pre-flight check: varied data has been transformed into a meaningful dataset and personas created to represent your workforce. Now the tools, quantitative data and qualitative data need to come together and work in concert to deliver insights.

There is not a one-size-fits-all solution to this step – each healthcare organization is unique with its own culture and influences. However, when clarity is created around what drives people (at the organizational and individual levels) leaders are enabled to lead well, ultimately leading to transformation.

Using advanced analytics establishes a clear communication channel between the workforce, policymakers and decision-makers. Designed and implemented correctly, it also arms overworked front-line managers with actionable insights to lead their teams and connect with individual employees on a more personal level.

4. Give nurses a seat in the cockpit

Digital tools and technologies (e.g., EHRs, clinical decision support tools, mobile apps, screening and referral tools) hold great promise for improving healthcare, but they can’t alone move the needle without formidable input and leadership from nurses. But unfortunately, as the National Academy of Medicine report “The Future of Nursing 2020-2030” notes, nurses have largely been left out of conversations on designing and using these systems. As famously stated in the 1967 movie “Cool Hand Luke”: what we’ve got here is failure to communicate.

Analysis of large amounts of data from sources like EHRs, wearable monitors and surveys can help in detecting and tracking disease trends, identifying disparities, and finding patterns of correlation. But nurses are needed to help build the artificial intelligence and advanced visualization methods that will enable these technologies to scale.

It is the CNO who understands the most about healthcare operations. It’s the CNO who, at the end of the day, every day, makes sure the job gets done. It’s the CNO trying to lead a burned-out team of nurses. Arm him or her with the information they need to lead well because right now they are flying blind.

Safely landing the flight

The current trajectory is unsustainable. Hospitals are closing beds and run the risk of closing their doors all together if these trends continue. Healthcare organizations cannot afford to maintain the status quo. It’s clear we have not shifted to a post-pandemic world, and it must be considered what a para-pandemic world will look like for healthcare organizations. Healthcare leaders must have the right instruments to navigate through this storm and potentially even come out stronger.

About Rich Kenny, MMCi, RN

Rich Kenny, MMCi, RN, is a flight nurse turned health informaticist now serving as an Industry Executive Advisor to SAS – the world’s leading analytics company. The majority of his nursing career was spent in the Duke Life Flight helicopter, during which as operations manager he foresaw the blurring line between healthcare operations and technology. He has advised leading healthcare organizations on nursing workforce strategies and experience design for many years.

 

   

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