10 questions every healthcare leader should consider

As the losses from the pandemic continue to be significant, many people are considering the lasting changes that healthcare providers and health systems may face when the pandemic ends. However, what healthcare leaders should consider now to prepare their organizations for the post-pandemic environment.

1. Staffing

• Review strategies for recruiting and retaining key clinical staff and key talent for your organization. Recognize the mental health, stress, and work-life balance issues faced by clinical staff after the pandemic, and develop work plans to support staff well-being while ensuring patient coverage. Ensure your organization’s staffing advantages and immediately resolve staffing shortages; prepare contingency plans, as staff shortages and recruitment challenges will continue to exist.

2. Balancing public health needs with cost-effective nursing services

• The pandemic demonstrates the need for a baseline assessment of ICU beds, ventilators, personal protective equipment, and infrastructure, which are critical to the public health needs that were lacking at the beginning of the pandemic. Federal, state, and local governments may require some of these services to continue to exist. As government financial support decreases or disappears, review your organization’s plan to manage these baseline service costs.

3. The evolution of nursing services-what changes will remain?

• Recognize that telemedicine is an ongoing platform, but understand the potential challenges of reimbursement, patient interaction, and clinical design.
  Identify short-term and long-term patient population trends after COVID to address expected changes in utilization rates across the organization.
  When you consider which services your organization should develop, collaborate with, or outsource with other organizations, the reimbursement changes for remote patient interaction must be integrated and evaluated into your care delivery plan.
  Finally, organizations must ensure that they are prepared to continue to expand and test patient health information (PHI) and data integrity.

4. IT Transformation-Use technology and evaluate the following:

• Information technology efficiency: The increase in the number of remote care has changed the skill set required to maintain and deliver the necessary tools with reliability, speed to market, and security. IT departments must focus on improving their talent pool, modifying delivery rules to a more agile way of thinking and expanding their capabilities to ensure IT effectiveness.
• Information technology performance: By providing more and broader technologies, rationalizing the application portfolio of different legacy technologies, and transforming them into cloud-based enterprise solutions with better price points (shared scale), your technology can provide critical information For more effective access.
• Digital support: Effective IT organizations double their investment in patient engagement tools, including virtual visits and custom applications/solutions. When integrated with core technologies, they can more effectively meet the needs of patients and providers.
• Analysis, insight and interoperability: Collecting powerful, trustworthy, clean, and safe data from the entire technology ecosystem, including Internet of Things (IoT) devices, is the cornerstone of providing information that leads to better care and improved performance. Consider using executable programs and tools that can transform data into information to develop a data governance strategy.
• automation: Robotic process automation and artificial intelligence can improve efficiency and reduce risks in areas such as the revenue cycle (scheduling, claims editing rules, work queues), disease management (automated diagnosis, error prevention, and personalized medicine).
• Network and information security: More and more cyber attacks and the huge cost of violations require role-based configuration/access, vulnerability scanning, penetration testing, and continuous training.

5. The balance sheet structure of the post-COVID world

• Review and evaluate your previous capital plan and capital visits for COVID to ensure that it supports changes in patient populations, new patient access portals, new volume forecasts, and changes in market demand.
• Determine new investment priorities.
• Assess your current real estate footprint to make changes in space planning and utilization needs.
• Determine short-term and long-term liquidity needs.

6. Post-COVID compliance assessment-consider your behavior carefully

• When the government comes to check the distribution of CARES funds, Payroll Protection Program (PPP) and other grants/funds, they will check, have you submitted the information to support these funds appropriately and accurately? Have you properly tracked expenditures and recorded usage? Determine if any reporting requirements may be missing.
• Are you able to accurately, promptly and appropriately answer questions from the Centers for Medical Insurance and Medicaid Services (CMS), Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and other regulatory agencies?

7. Am I a hunter or a prey?

• Integration may increase. Has the competitive aspect of your market changed?
• Evaluating your organization as a possible integrator or where it may be integrated is key. This may affect short-term and long-term strategic thinking.
• Identifying federal and state regulatory and licensing impacts that may facilitate or limit the merger may influence your decision.

8. Re-evaluate your pre-pandemic strategic priorities and determine their place in the post-pandemic world

• Provider risk: Has the pandemic changed the urgency or timing of your market? Should your organization lead or follow?
• Evaluate the impact of accidental billing legislation and the continued price pressures of insurance companies in the network, and make sure you are prepared for risks and challenges.
• Consumer-driven care: How has the pandemic changed/accelerated the dynamics of this care delivery? What is the next step in building a consumer-oriented organization?

9. Insurance, payer and reimbursement

• Analyzing the gaps that will appear in coverage and how to address these gaps in the near and long-term will help your strategic plan: Medicaid, the re-emergence of exchange programs, other government programs, charity care, or other forms of reimbursement?
• Assess which services may face reimbursement changes or challenges, and determine how to manage these changes to ensure continued care delivery and appropriate reimbursement.
• Are your revenue cycle processes and systems flexible enough to meet current and future challenges?

10. Develop new metrics for your organization

• Rather than updating old metrics such as average length of stay (ALOS), utilization, and number of cases, it is better to recognize this opportunity to change your organization’s metrics and determine how to adapt and help advance the health and well-being of your community.
• Some key issues to consider when reimagining indicators:

1. 1. 1. What metrics will help shape the future vision of your organization?
      2. How can you use the well-deserved recognition of healthcare providers as heroes to further build and strengthen your organization and make it an important part of the community?

• Is your entire organization aligned with well-defined metrics that truly represent your organization’s vision?

Healthcare organizations have demonstrated tremendous foresight, innovation, and flexibility in responding to the unprecedented challenges posed by the pandemic. However, after the disappearance of Covid-19, the challenges and changes in the healthcare industry will continue for a long time.Understanding and solving these problems requires healthcare leaders to ask themselves and their organizations appropriate questions and take action now, Thrive in the post-pandemic world.

Photo: Nuthawut Somsuk, Getty Images