Healthcare Organizations Seeking Solutions to Optimally Support Their Workforce at HIMSS23 Conference
In the rapidly evolving landscape of healthcare, digital innovation and workforce shortages are presenting unique challenges. To address these issues, healthcare systems are adopting strategic approaches that prioritize the needs of patients and staff.
**Identifying Needs**
1. **Comprehensive Community Assessments:** Conducting thorough community health needs assessments is crucial to identify health priorities and gaps in care. This process involves analysing data on patient outcomes, social determinants of health, and healthcare access barriers.
2. **Stakeholder Engagement:** Involving healthcare professionals, patients, and community leaders in discussions is essential to understand the challenges and opportunities presented by digital innovation and workforce shortages.
3. **Leveraging Technology:** Utilising data analytics and AI tools can help analyse workflows, patient outcomes, and operational efficiency, thereby pinpointing areas where digital transformation would yield the most significant benefits.
**Prioritizing Needs**
1. **Focus on High-Impact Areas:** Prioritise investments in digital technologies and workforce innovations that address the most critical operational and patient care issues.
2. **Systems Thinking:** Apply systems thinking principles to assess how different components of the healthcare system interact and impact each other. This helps in creating cohesive strategies for improvement.
3. **Risk-Based Approach:** Employ a risk-based strategy to identify and address potential bottlenecks and inefficiencies in healthcare delivery.
4. **Collaborative Solutions:** Encourage collaboration between healthcare providers, tech innovators, and other stakeholders to develop solutions that are tailored to specific needs and contexts.
5. **Evaluate and Adapt:** Continuously evaluate the effectiveness of implemented solutions and adapt strategies as needed based on feedback and new data.
**Innovative Practices in Action**
HCA Healthcare has successfully implemented virtual nursing in acute-care areas, streamlining tasks such as admissions, discharge teaching, hourly rounding, and pain reassessment. This initiative, well-received by nurses and patients, allows retired or academic nurses to provide care without working long hours.
David Higginson, Executive Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer at Phoenix Children's Hospital, is focusing on practical applications of machine learning. Machine learning models at Phoenix Children's Hospital are used for diagnosing malnutrition in children, predicting patient no-shows, supporting staff retention, and identifying potential donors.
Providence and IBM have developed a predictive scheduler tool to automate and streamline a laborious manual process, with the goal of helping caregivers focus more on patient care and less on administrative tasks. Providence Health System is also using a predictive scheduler to automate staffing plans.
Philips is joining forces with AWS to develop generative AI applications to aid clinical decision support, while a collaboration between 3M and Amazon Web Services aims to refine ambient clinical documentation with AI. Microsoft and Epic are working together to integrate generative AI into an electronic health record system to increase productivity.
The World Health Organization has urged countries to prioritize supporting and expanding their healthcare workforce due to serious shortages. In the U.S., about 100,000 registered nurses left the workforce over the past two years amid the COVID-19 pandemic due to retirements, stress, and burnout. Another 610,388 RNs could leave by 2027 for the same reasons.
In all these efforts, it's essential to remember the importance of understanding the problem before implementing machine learning solutions, as emphasised by David Higginson. He warns against issues that require high accuracy and encourages getting used to failure. By taking these steps, healthcare systems can effectively identify and address their needs amidst digital innovation and workforce challenges.
- To improve mental health and workplace wellness, healthcare systems could explore the use of various therapies and treatments, such as AI-driven cognitive behavioral therapy or stress management apps, that leverage data and cloud computing to provide personalized support to staff.
- To better understand the impact of digital innovation on the mental health and well-being of healthcare staff, it would be beneficial to conduct academic research or surveys to gather detailed insights and data on the experiences of healthcare workers in the rapidly evolving digital landscape.
- Artificial Intelligence can be harnessed to develop predictive models for staff burnout, absenteeism, and turnover rates, allowing healthcare systems to proactively address workforce challenges and prioritize employee wellness.
- In response to the growing need for healthcare professionals, healthcare systems could explore partnerships with educational institutions or training programs to increase the availability of skilled workers and address workforce shortages using technology-based training solutions.
