Think back about data access and management in your hospital over the past two years: Was the fundamental information needed to run the organization—in other words, your healthcare operations data—accessible and accurate? Or was the pandemic a wake-up call to the need for better operational efficiencies?
There are lessons to be learned on how to make your enterprise operations data mobile and crisis ready. You can start by ensuring you have three essential operations data needs covered.
Digitally connect all provider data
Quickly yet compliantly credentialing, privileging, and hiring the most qualified clinicians amid competition requires superior data management. Most health systems suffer misalignment among the many individuals and departments responsible for onboarding, creating an immediate disadvantage.
Connecting disparate technologies used for provider data management bolsters safety and can give patients and providers a better experience. This is true in times of normal operations or in a crisis when you must expedite hiring yet uphold quality standards. Onboarding affects patient and provider satisfaction, compliance, and revenue. Consider that job turnover in the PCP workforce costs $979 million in annual excess healthcare costs across the U.S. population.
To optimize onboarding using better provider data management:
- Give individuals and teams technology to communicate and collaborate, preserving resources and enabling new providers to see patients faster.
- Digitally gather and store credentialing data and documents using automation, including checks for expired or suspended medical licenses.
- Connect provider data to a provider directory software program to give patients and patient-access teams provider search and scheduling capabilities.
- Centralize data to eliminate provider frustration when multiple departments request the same data and end the practice of reentering the same provider data.
Manage quality data with dashboards
Your organization generates vast quantities of quality-related data for compliance. Managing and interpreting it is near impossible when it’s stored in separate systems. During emergencies or crises, the risks to safety and quality care are already elevated. As a result, your organization requires quality management dashboards to increase the visibility and transparency of quality data metrics and measures that are “flashing red.”
Like a car’s dashboard, healthcare quality dashboards provide a visual representation of data that guides decision making. When you know how many adverse events or near misses occurred, for example, you can decide on the best corrective actions.
Collectively, quality data can be used to compare current and past performance; performances across departments and facilities; and ultimately, identify areas for improvement. It can also help track responses to operational changes and improvement initiatives. Quality systems have been reported to improve patient safety by reducing infection rates, medication errors, and falls.
And as healthcare moves to value-based care and value-based payments, it’s important to focus on the right metrics to streamline the collection and analysis processes—while also recognizing that metrics and targets will vary based on location, patient population, and affiliated payers and partners. Once those are clearly established, your organization can keep a better pulse on performance during times of relative calm or during a crisis.
Give clinicians better collaboration tools
Multidisciplinary clinical collaboration was never more vital than during the pandemic. Working as a team to assess and treat patients makes the most of limited resources and helps to support exhausted personnel.
For the providers tasked with meeting the needs of all patients, access to a clinical collaboration platform acts as a safeguard. When used across the enterprise and in off-campus locations, a clinical collaboration platform makes it easier for staff to do their jobs well, even during a national health emergency.
Cloud-based clinical collaboration platforms unify disparate communication modes using mobile devices. The technology provides flexibility, protects sensitive patient data, and makes it convenient for providers to send texts via a HIPAA-compliant platform.
Actions like reviewing test results and collaborating virtually as a team can be accomplished as part of a regular shift. Role-based and team-based messaging means that a clinician can send a message, text, or test result and know that it will immediately get to the right person. Hospitals use this technology to streamline communication and workflows so providers can collaborate using real-time patient data, no matter their location.
Disasters hit hospitals and the communities in which they operate with regular frequency. Ensure your healthcare operations solution is ready to handle whatever comes next. Learn more today about symplr’s total solutions.