The powerful changes underway in the healthcare industry are creating tremendous strain on management of the healthcare workforce.
Never before have effective and efficient workforce management and technology solutions been so important to hospitals, health systems and other healthcare enterprises – and the staffing vendors that serve them.
Healthcare is a labor intensive industry, with more than half of the budget of any healthcare facility devoted to personnel. The performance of workforce management and technology solutions is becoming increasingly critical due to industry trends including mergers and acquisitions, the rise of new care settings such as retail clinics, and the growing mix of temporary and permanent clinical staff.
Because managers do not have the necessary expertise or capacity to address all of today's labor-related challenges, many healthcare enterprises are turning to healthcare workforce experts. Healthcare providers must focus their energy on patient care; workforce experts can help by removing many other burdens. Effective workforce management and technology solutions are the key.
Tech Challenges Abound in Healthcare
One of the dominant trends in healthcare today is mergers and acquisitions, with a principal objective of cost savings through reduced technology redundancies and process inefficiencies. But merging disparate workforce management systems can be a difficult chore for obvious reasons. Workforce tech usually breaks down into "build" or "buy" or "lease" -- customized solutions designed for the specific needs of a provider or an off-the-shelf business system that's not specifically designed for healthcare. Both can present difficulties in changing business environments.
In healthcare, there already exists significant concerns surrounding technology, including information security, HIPPA, PHI and the exchange of data across systems. Add these concerns to the challenges of consolidating homegrown and commercial systems, or trying to adapt an inadequate system to new and complex tasks, and it's easy to understand how burdensome healthcare workforce technology can become without the necessary expertise.
At AMN Healthcare, we have been expanding our services to clients through strategic acquisitions of companies and intensive organic development. One of the keys to our successful integration of these companies has been a multi-year, multimillion-dollar program to upgrade our front-office and back office systems and to develop a more standardized platform across our staffing businesses.
A basic example of much-needed automation advancement is the data entry and collection of timesheets. It is still a common practice in the healthcare staffing industry to have paper timesheets faxed to a central office where checks are processed. AMN is moving to an all-digital platform, making the time entry process easier and timelier. Fewer hands are touching the pieces of the process, which means less chance for error and faster payments to clinical staff. This also equates to less administrative time expended by the healthcare providers that we serve.
'How can we make things better?'
The best run companies take an outside-in perspective by asking the question: How can we make things better for our clients and clinicians? This is something I always keep in the forefront as I think about current and future projects.
The majority of our employees are on the move, whether they are healthcare professionals, account managers, relationship managers, business development or AMN leaders. Our people need to have the capability to do their jobs from wherever their lives and work take them. This makes the necessity of a safe, secure and user-friendly mobile strategy of vital importance. To facilitate this, we have adopted a suite of collaborative tools. We have moved our mail service to the cloud and have evolved a secure cloud file sharing solution to provide our teams with anytime-anywhere access to work on projects and to collaborate with their teams. We have also contracted with MobileIron for bring your own device (BYOD) mobile device management. This gives us the assurance that our information is containerized and can be wiped clean in instances of device loss. We view mobile accessibility as a benefit, and currently, the majority of the AMN workforce has signed up for BYOD.
Interoperability is a big opportunity for us, as it is for the healthcare organizations we serve. And like provider organizations, we had the same hurdles early on. The healthcare industry is immersed in consolidation and massive electronic health record system implementations. The next generation of opportunities in healthcare will be through large-scale system and data interoperability. There are significant untapped efficiencies that can be gained in interoperability, much like at supply chain-based organizations where data exchanges are more mainstream.
AMN is one of the pioneers in cloud-based workforce technologies in healthcare, and as a result we've been able to provide our clients with a better experience. This approach has allowed us to create efficiency and cost-savings opportunities both for our business and for provider organizations. It is an area where we always will be working to improve our service – our end-user experience does not start and stop with a series of projects but through behavior and experience analysis, piloting new technologies, and surveying our clients and clinicians to better understand how to continuously improve their experiences. I do not believe a forward-thinking organization is ever done when it comes to developing ways to provide a better end-user experience.
Walking the Talk on Workforce Tech
System scalability, reliability, and adaptability are important to the smooth completion of an acquisition and integration. At the end of 2014, AMN acquired three companies, two of which were technology companies. In 2015, we acquired another five companies, adding to AMN's workforce solutions portfolio. Because of the groundwork in workforce management and technology solutions we had already completed, these integrations are going smoothly and already yielding results for our clients.
At the end of the day, a healthcare provider has to evaluate whether to opt for a do-it-yourself solution or partnering with an expert like AMN for innovative workforce solutions. The healthcare delivery organizations and their services providers have the same concerns about operational efficiency, system scalability and interoperability, information security, and the ability to execute mission critical strategic programs. But you must be able to walk the talk. In the transformative world of today's healthcare industry, healthcare workforce experts can relieve the growing burden of workforce technology from healthcare providers who are not prepared to shoulder it. That way, providers can concentrate on delivering the best healthcare possible to their patients.