The past year has been one of constant change, with ongoing challenges and dramatic changes in the way care is delivered to patients.Now in 2022, tThe long-tail impact of the pandemic persists for millions of people around the world—patients, families, and providers—leading to severe staffing shortages, increased burnout, job dissatisfaction, and increased turnover.
In fact, in the last quarter of 2021, analyze Hospital employment fell by 94,000 compared to February 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.Another analysis show Staffing challenges have cost hospitals a staggering $24 billion during the pandemic.
None of this is sustainable, but we are not without encouraging indicators of change. While the digital transformation of the healthcare industry continues to advance, accelerated by the growing popularity of telehealth and digital engagement, we are also seeing the impact of a stronger digital foundation on the future of healthcare.
Looking ahead, I believe the following four trends will define healthcare in 2022 and beyond.
Trend 1: Clinician Burnout Crisis Will Create Necessary Workflow Changes
Clinician burnout is almost universal.a recent survey established 98% of clinicians experience burnout. This has a profound and well-documented impact on the entire continuum of care, from employee benefits and turnover to patient outcomes and financial resiliency.
Because the causes of burnout are broad and different people experience it differently, this is a particularly delicate issue that needs help addressing. However, as more healthcare organizations continue to evolve and adjust their digital transformation strategies, we will start to see many necessary workflow changes emerge.
As we look to the road ahead, technological advancements will remove friction and irrelevant manual tasks from clinician workflows, effectively eliminating discrete functions that can lead to burnout. For example, although patient documentation is critical to care, it can contribute to provider burnout. Today, we are powered by environmental sensing technology that safely “listens” to provider-patient encounters and effectively lets clinical documentation write itself. Instead of spending two hours documenting every hour of patient care, providers are free to focus on what matters most: caring for others.
As a result, we will see a return to job satisfaction, which will also have a positive impact on patient satisfaction and outcomes.
Trend 2: Global nurse shortage will change clinical documentation improvement (CDI) programs
In the past two years, nearly one-third of healthcare professionals have considered leaving the industry entirely.Even before the pandemic, the World Health Organization report There is a global shortage of nurses.
These challenges have prompted healthcare managers to sharpen their pencils and focus on doing more with less. In many cases, this means renewed efforts to create and optimize revenue streams, as well as a shift in how organizations approach and manage clinical documentation improvement (CDI) initiatives.
Accurately documenting and telling a patient’s full story has always been important. Nurses have supported CDI programs for many years by serving as a key liaison between coders and the nursing team. But hospitals today are more crowded than ever, and coupled with a shortage of nurses, pulling good nursing staff away from the bedside is an almost impossible option.
Here too, technology can play an important role in managing CDI projects. When organizations rely on AI-driven CDI solutions, they can keep skilled care teams focused on patients, while powerful automation and collaboration tools lead the way in clinical document integrity efforts. Meanwhile, AI-driven clinical guidance at the point of care could support more accurate documentation before submission to a clinical documentation specialist’s desk.
Trend 3: Strategic partnerships between providers and health systems will emerge
The healthcare ecosystem is necessarily more interconnected than ever, which means healthcare systems must change the way they view technology providers; that is, no longer as suppliers, but as successful strategic partners. Technology providers have long been able to provide strategic guidance, professional services and even compliance support – areas that are more important than ever as digital transformation progresses.
Instead of telling suppliers what to need, health systems work side-by-side with technology suppliers to address a range of challenges facing the healthcare industry. From fighting burnout and streamlining provider workflows to mastering telehealth and delighting patients, these partnerships will become critical in the years ahead.
Trend 4: New AI use cases will continue to disrupt the norm
Consider how the AI marketplace is creating collaborative, democratized environments to solve many of our world’s toughest (and, let’s be honest, sometimes dumbest) challenges. But in healthcare, AI is already delivering incredible results and is pushing the boundaries of what is possible.
For example, radiologists can leverage AI to bring key services directly into their workflows: from machine learning image analysis to automatically detect, measure and characterize suspected Covid-19 findings, to workflow prioritization of intracranial hemorrhage cases, and more.
While it seems to be accelerating every day, we are just beginning to see the full potential of AI in transforming healthcare. In the coming year, AI will discover even more game-changing use cases.
Stay ahead in the coming year
The pandemic has exacerbated the challenges facing healthcare. But it’s also driving digital transformation faster than many expected, laying a solid foundation for the future of healthcare.
By 2022, healthcare organizations will be more able than ever to address clinician and caregiver burnout, strengthen financial and clinical documentation integrity, improve patient outcomes and quality of care, and improve patient outcomes and quality of care by applying AI to these high Influence problems to restore the joy of practicing medicine.
Photo: tonefotografia, Getty Images
