As healthcare providers face economic headwinds, depressed volumes, and formidable competition, they are rethinking traditional approaches to growth.
To succeed in this evolving landscape, providers must attract the right patients into the system and retain them over time – but they must do so cost-effectively.
While many leaders have turned to intelligent automation to expand staff capacity and reduce costs, it is increasingly becoming the basis of sustainable topline revenue growth. Using intelligent automation, hospitals, health systems, and physician groups can deliver hassle-free primary and specialty care access points. They can also hardwire care progression by guiding patients to stay in-network along their care journeys.
In a July Becker's Hospital Review webinar, Notable’s Sarah Rosen, Product Marketing Lead, and Bri Buch, Patient Access Solutions Lead, shared how healthcare providers can unlock growth goals with intelligent approaches to patient intake, scheduling, and referrals.
Four key takeaways:
1. Today’s economic pressures make growth an imperative, but patient access remains a barrier. Hospital expenses have increased by more than 20% per patient from 2019 to 2021, with spending at record highs across labor, supply chain, and capital investment costs. With patient expectations evolving and competition from competitors threatening market share, the focus on costs must be balanced with revenue growth.
Yet every healthcare player – both traditional and non-traditional – is vying for the same patients. Most health system executives believe their organizations are underperforming in patient access, with nearly 70% of leaders giving patient access at their systems a “C” grade or lower. In spite of the progress accelerated by COVID-19, patients continue to face barriers that make it challenging to find, schedule, and prepare for the care they need.
2. Hiring more people isn’t the answer. Historically, patient access – spanning patient intake, scheduling, referrals, and more – has relied heavily on human intervention, but the cycle of continuously increasing staffing levels to support patient demand is not scalable. The competition for talent is simply too fierce, with the median staff turnover rate per year at 10% for business operations, 16% for clinical support, and 20% for front office support at primary care practices.
3. Status quo solutions fail to drive patient acquisition and retention. These investments have fallen short of expectations because they create heavy patient burden, more work for staff, and siloed impact.
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- Heavy patient burden causes preventable leakage, since most solutions aren’t intelligent enough to engage patients at every step in their care journey. Instead, they rely on the patient to initiate and drive their own care forward – but this leads to opportunities for leakage.
- Digitization without automation creates more work for staff. As a result, healthcare providers must continue to staff up to compensate for technology shortages – which is not an option for many providers.
- Advancing the needs of one stakeholder group at the expense of others leads to siloed impact. A myopic focus on the experience of one stakeholder group – be it patients, providers, or staff – often means that other groups are excluded. This translates into a solution that only works in the short-term and cannot be scaled.
4. Intelligent automation is the engine for healthcare providers to acquire new patients and retain them across their care journey. “As patients move through their health journeys, providers can leverage intelligent automation to hardwire care progression and guide patients to stay in-network,” shared Bri Buch. “By addressing challenges that patients, staff, and providers face at key touchpoints in the patient’s health journey – preparing for care, seeking follow-up care, and identifying care needs – providers can increase patient acquisition and retention in a way that minimizes administrative burden for staff and providers.”
To explore how Notable can help your organization unlock revenue growth by expanding patient access and removing barriers to care, read this whitepaper or request a demo with a Notable product specialist.