In today’s rapidly evolving healthcare landscape, hospitals face numerous challenges in delivering quality patient care while optimizing their daily operations. One crucial aspect of achieving this balance is their investment in human capital. Hospital staff members are the lifeblood of any healthcare institution and enabling them to focus on patient care rather than being burdened by IT challenges is key. In short: enabling your people with the right tools, automating workflows and leveraging an IT managed services team can streamline and enhance your hospital’s IT infrastructure. Let me explain.
The right tools, the right time
Hospital staff members are often expected to do their best with a crucial element missing: patient data. This largely occurs due to a lack of interoperability between different health IT solutions, creating situations where clinicians must switch back and forth between different programs to find the information they need. Creating costly situations due to time waste and running duplicative tests, poor interoperability can even make clinician burnout worse, wasting their time and creating frustrating scenarios for the workforce. Improving interoperability is one step organizations can take to relieve some of the technology hurdles affecting provider experiences and wellbeing, and is crucial to saving your organization valuable resources—including staff retention and creating smoother daily workflows.
Automation: Good for your finances, and your people
The claim-denial process is often a hurdle for healthcare organizations. If there are issues with data completeness or accuracy that leads to a denial, the time spent reviewing, correcting and re-submitting a claim can delay the processing of that claim for 12–48 hours. The longer a claim takes to process, the longer your organization must wait before you can receive payment. In addition, your staff is spending their time resubmitting the same claim twice or more, instead of moving on to other claims and tasks. However, there are ways to alleviate this burden. There’s robotic process automation (RPA), a valuable tool that can automatically correct claims based on what it’s learned and can complete highly repetitive tasks in a few seconds, whereas the same task may take several minutes if done manually. Second, improving workflows wherever possible can help to improve productivity. Each can increase efficiency and support positive patient identification, which leads to safer patients and more accurate billing.
Leveraging expertise
Managed Services provides hospitals with access to a team of experienced IT professionals that specializes in healthcare IT systems. These experts possess the knowledge and skill set necessary to address the specific challenges faced by hospitals, such as electronic health records (EHR) management, network security and data analytics. Hospitals can tap into this expertise and ensure that their IT systems are effectively designed, implemented and maintained.
According to a study by MarketsandMarkets, the global healthcare IT outsourcing market is projected to reach $50.4 billion by 2027, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.7% from 2022 to 2027. This indicates a growing trend of healthcare institutions seeking external expertise to manage their IT needs.
IT systems, like any other complex infrastructure, require ongoing maintenance and support to operate optimally. However, hospital IT departments often struggle with limited resources and staff shortages, resulting in delayed responses to critical issues. Managed Services works to alleviate this burden by offering proactive monitoring, regular system updates and prompt technical support. With 24/7 monitoring and swift incident resolution, hospital staff can experience minimal disruptions, enabling them to focus on delivering exceptional patient care.
A survey conducted by Spiceworks in 2021 found that among healthcare organizations using managed IT services, 71% reported improved IT system uptime, and 61% reported faster problem resolution. These statistics highlight the positive impact of managed services on minimizing IT downtime and maximizing staff productivity.
By leveraging specialized expertise, providing interoperable solutions, offering scalability and flexibility and optimizing the IT infrastructure, hospitals can unlock the full potential of their human capital. With Altera Digital Health as a trusted partner, healthcare professionals can dedicate their time and energy to what matters most: saving lives and improving patient outcomes.
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