Providers are committed to serving the sick and vulnerable. However, with provider burnout at an all-time high, what happens when the healthcare professionals we rely on are clocked in on the job but have emotionally clocked out?
While physicians traditionally worked independently in private practice, they are now more than ever working as hospital employees. Autonomy, clinical decision-making, and feeling welcome to enter the conversation with administrative leadership are crucial to boosting engagement for all key members of the healthcare team, including physicians and nurses.
The U.S. population is aging, with the number of individuals 65 and older doubling over the next 40 years. To meet the demands of the aging population entering Medicare and Medicare Advantage programs, we must ensure our providers are given all the tools necessary to reduce burnout, improve engagement, and enjoy professional fulfillment for the years ahead.
Learn what is causing provider engagement to be at record lows and how provider engagement strategies, including technology, are key to improving the quality of care for all…especially senior patients.
Why is Provider Engagement so Important?
We speak a lot about patient engagement, and for good reason. When patients are engaged, they are more likely to be proactive in making health decisions, which improves outcomes. However, provider engagement is just as important. If a provider isn’t fully committed to their organization’s success and not fully present and tuned into their patients, the quality of care suffers.
Unfortunately, according to recent self-assessments surveying physician engagement, three in five physicians are “disengaged.” Poor engagement is common across the healthcare team continuum, particularly among nurses.
Recent surveys given to 1,923 nurses across 37 hospital facilities investigating nurses’ perceptions of their workplace and other key elements associated with engagement revealed less than half of nurses are “fully engaged” and 20% of nurses working within emergency departments are “unengaged.”
Provider engagement is imperative in healthcare. When physicians, nurses, and other key players of the healthcare team are engaged:
- The patient experience is enhanced.
- Care coordination across team members is improved.
- Provider burnout is reduced.
- The organization enjoys increased retention and saves money.
Why Providers Are Getting Burned Out
Burnout is so prevalent within the healthcare industry that it’s been called out as “potentially the most disruptive force” facing U.S. healthcare organizations in the next three years. The characteristics of provider burnout include emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and feeling of low personal accomplishment.
Burnout not only leaves providers feeling less empowered and engaged to serve the needs of their patients, but it can also be dangerous. Provider burnout might result in an increased risk of medical errors and malpractice, lower quality of care for patients, and high costs due to high physician turnover and illness.
So what are the contributing factors to provider burnout to begin with?
Well, lives are on the line. Understandably, this leads to considerable stress. In addition, healthcare organizations require clinicians to maintain meticulous records of all patient interactions. Much of this record-keeping is clerical, requiring providers to divert their attention from patients to pushing paper.
Add to this hard-to-get patient data that is siloed away by different healthcare teams across multiple sites—and even inaccessible within the same healthcare organization. This lack of communication across teams and de-centralized inaccurate data makes a provider’s difficult job even more difficult.
How to Empower Providers with Data
To minimize burnout and help providers reconnect with their passion to serve the health of our communities, healthcare organizations must take a hard look at how they collect, organize, and secure their patient data.
Making your patient-related data functional and ready for use need not be complicated. Consider the following three opportunities to leverage your data better, thereby serving your providers so they can better serve patients.
1. Extend Access to Secured Data
Your providers need data to make critical decisions. Making patient-related data easy to access without compromising security is a way to save your providers from burnout.
Use a healthcare data platform that provides a patient 360 view that connects all data from disparate sources into a centralized space. Data is accessed by pertinent providers in a secure way and also extends analytics and reporting insights to your teams so they can make better decisions for better patient health outcomes.
2. Optimize the Patient Experience
By easing the paperwork burden from your providers with a healthcare data platform that meets future demands, providers are less stressed and have more mental space to focus on what they do best….providing care to patients.
Furthermore, as the data is securely centralized and accessible, inaccurate and inconsistent data is minimized, allowing providers to deliver optimum care and improve the patient experience.
3. Satisfy Interoperability Requirements
Meeting CMS interoperability requirements is a challenge when patient data is dispersed across systems.
With a healthcare data platform, both the organization at large and the provider may rest assured that high-value patient data is securely located on a single management platform. This dramatically frees your providers up from following fossilized leads and paperwork forensics.
Providers are human beings who are not designed to ingest, process, analyze, and report on patient data at scale. But, Skypoint Cloud is designed to do all of this. Allow Skypoint to focus on the data so your providers can focus on their patients instead. Get started by learning more about our Medicare Advantage solutions.
