The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted numerous shortcomings, health inequities, and inequalities prevalent across healthcare systems worldwide. These inadequacies and failures prevent patients from enjoying healthcare accessibility and quality care. The ongoing challenges and pandemic forced healthcare leaders to reassess existing processes and develop patient-centric systems.
The healthcare sector is witnessing dramatic digital transformations as emerging technologies aim to make clinical care more accessible for patients worldwide. However, the rapid pace of digital change has increased the ongoing challenges for healthcare leaders struggling to overcome staffing shortages.
There’s a burgeoning shortage of skilled healthcare providers, experienced physicians, and skilled nurses.
The healthcare systems deal with staffing shortages, digital innovation, patient-centric affordability plans, and numerous other challenges to deliver quality care. While healthcare and pharmaceutical investments continue to support the industry, system challenges to deliver quality care are also taking place–staffing shortages, digital innovation, patient-centric affordability plans, and many others.How can healthcare leaders overcome the ongoing challenges to provide quality care and positive treatment outcomes? Keep reading to find out for the Ongoing Challenges.
Table of Contents
Addressing Staffing Shortages
Hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare facilities need to increase their talent recruitment and retaining efforts to address staffing shortages.
Healthcare facilities cannot regulate and improve patient care quality while struggling with personnel shortages. The absence of skilled physicians, surgeons, nurses, and orderlies creates chaos, delays, and medical malpractices caused by clinical inexperience.
Expanding recruitment drives to attract talented healthcare leaders by creating new job roles is crucial to overcome staffing shortages. The shortages of skilled physicians have given rise to the demand for qualified and experienced family nurses. Nurses specializing in family care can perform the clinical duties of physicians involving diagnosis, treatment design, and monitoring care.
Hospitals and clinics are increasingly hiring family nurse practitioners to help households and families struggling due to the absence of physicians. Registered nurses and new entrants can secure lucrative positions by pursuing online FNP programs and responding to skill demands. Combining continual learning with the exhausting duties of a full-time nurse isn’t easy, but the e-learning route offers ample flexibility.
Online programs are certified by prestigious nursing schools and higher education institutions to make academic pursuits more accessible. Online degree programs allow nurses and other healthcare professionals to prepare themselves for leadership roles with educational advancement. Pursuing a family nursing specialization will enable nurses to focus on clinical significance and actively participate in patient care and treatments.
Family nurse practitioners enjoy community presence and prestige and a healthy work-life balance with financial stability.
Embracing Digital Health Innovations
Digital health innovations and emerging technologies make healthcare facilities more advanced and innovative. They transform and improve diagnostic tools and regulate patient care with state-of-the-art equipment and clinical devices. Digital innovations like Telehealth and electronic health records improve transparency and patient accessibility.
Medical devices allow doctors and nurses to monitor their patients without in-person checkups. They reduce the barriers between patient-doctor communications to allow patients easy access to clinical care. What’s more, the advent of sophisticated technologies, like artificial intelligence, makes diagnostic tools more accurate and efficient.
These digital innovations have numerous advantages, but harnessing disruptive technologies isn’t easy. Healthcare leaders have to hire IT professionals to train their clinical and administrative staff to work alongside digital health tools. Healthcare facilities must cultivate digital literacy and hire experts who can help facilities adapt to digital innovation.
Not all healthcare providers are receptive to the shift away from conventional processes and the learning needs of digital tools. Healthcare leaders must incentivize their employees to embrace and adapt to digital innovation and facilitate digital literacy. The adaptation process is usually chaotic due to adopting new techniques and shifting patient records to the cloud.
Healthcare facilities need future-focused and digitally savvy administrative leaders to steer their organizations towards digital innovation.
Combining Affordability and Profitability
Governments worldwide are responding to protests demanding equality, affordability, and accessibility to healthcare facilities. These responses typically come from federal and state-led healthcare packages, subsidies, and medical device manufacturing outsourcing. The pandemic has highlighted the rampant unaffordability and social divide caused by private-run hospitals and clinical facilities.
Programs like Medicare and Medicaid benefit patients by enhancing affordability and access to quality care. However, they create numerous budgeting and profitability challenges for hospitals focused on preventing losses and delivering quality care. In most cases, governments promise reimbursement, but the amounts reimbursed are considerably less than hospital expenses.
Healthcare facilities must recoup their spending on clinical equipment, operational costs, pharmaceutical expenses, and other investments to provide quality care. Government reimbursements for healthcare insurance plans don’t support the profitability models of private-run healthcare facilities. Hospitals cannot compromise patient care quality to maintain profitability, resulting in negative publicity and medical malpractices.
Therefore, healthcare leaders and administrators must find ways to cut costs and create budgets that support patient care quality and affordability. This challenge is mammoth, as profitability is crucial to maintain healthcare standards and ensure business survival. Hiring financially savvy healthcare leaders is critical to devising financial strategies that maintain profitability and patient care affordability.
Developing Patient-Centric Care Models
Patients are increasingly vocal, and the emergence of digital and social patient communities has increased the pressure on healthcare leaders. Modern-day healthcare facilities are increasingly focused on developing patient-centric care models that prioritize care. These models mark a shift away from conventional practices of demanding payment before admitting sensitive patients or delayed assistance.
Hospitals no longer afford to attract negative publicity by denying quality care or affordability as the world struggles against a pandemic. The shift to patient-centric care models comes with various challenges, demanding care providers to work together to understand patient needs.
Many hospitals are anxious at disrupting their elite patronage with the advent of insurance plans that make healthcare accessible for all. Healthcare providers need to devise comprehensive and individualized care plans, accounting for their patients’ physical, mental, and social needs. All patients must receive equal attention and care quality, regardless of their social and financial status.
The shift to patient-centered models revolves around addressing the 4 C’s of patient care. These factors include:
- Encouraging personal connections with patients
- Fostering cultural responsiveness
- Building community ties
- Prioritizing care continuity
Healthcare systems can embrace patient-centered care models by hiring providers from diverse backgrounds to build cultural responsiveness. Diverse healthcare teams ensure clinical preparedness and robust care quality for patients from various ethnic-cultural backgrounds.
Final Thoughts
Talent acquisition and maintaining diversely inclusive healthcare teams are crucial in resolving the most overwhelming healthcare challenges. Healthcare leaders must equip clinical and administrative units with qualified, skilled, and digitally savvy professionals.
Digital innovation comes with numerous challenges, but its implementation works wonders at enhancing efficiency. Digitally savvy healthcare facilities encounter lesser challenges while embracing patient-centric models and boosting profitability while compromising patient care affordability.
