04 May How Healthcare IT Personnel Can Improve Overall Healthcare Efficiency
Perusing the news, one will find many articles discussing how American healthcare systems are failing. As the Institute for Healthcare Improvement described: “Our fragmented health care system promotes not only wasted time, but also wasted effort, materials, medications, money, and trust.” Healthcare IT workers are an important factor when it comes to the productivity of healthcare facilities, and the right team will yield the greatest results.
Healthcare IT workers such as data analysts and data scientists can directly calculate the areas where hospitals and healthcare facilities need improvement, but there are other ways these and other technically-trained team members can improve overall efficiency. This post identifies some productivity techniques to utilize healthcare IT employees to increase the overall quality of healthcare.
1. Implement asset management technologies.
In the medical field, equipment is often as important as personnel. If the equipment is poorly managed, healthcare facilities will lose productivity. Time is wasted searching for equipment or waiting for it to be cleaned or repaired. Asset management prevents delays as the proper healthcare IT team can label and track medical equipment with asset management technologies. Though implementation of the technologies is a good start, IT personnel can continuously monitor the equipment and offer recommendations to improve the efficiency of daily activities and care.
2. Utilize healthcare IT to better delegate tasks.
A large source of inefficiency in healthcare facilities is that employees are spending their time on tasks that aren’t directly beneficial to patient care. Doctors complain about too much paperwork. Nurses report time lost tracking down lab results. The proper healthcare IT team can talk to the employees losing productivity and can work to find solutions. Shortened forms or lab tracking software can be implemented easily by those with the proper technical knowledge, for example. The trick is to hire experienced workers who are good at problem solving and creative thinking.
3. Monitor frontline failures.
The Health Services Research Journal reported that equipment, supply and facility failures make up at least thirty six percent of failures within healthcare facilities. The journal explained that these front-line failures are often ignored by quality improvement programs, and that these failures are a huge source of inefficiency.
Healthcare IT workers are needed to track and monitor these failures. Additionally, they can speak with frontline workers to address concerns before productivity begins to decline.
4. Healthcare IT workers can present information to better educate staff on efficiency protocols.
Collaboration is consistently cited as a critical means of improving healthcare efficiency. Too often, healthcare facilities have teams of various personnel work independently of each other. Instead, communication between all employees helps improve productivity.
Due to the nature of their work, healthcare IT employees are separate from the rest of hospital employees. This is a poor management system as IT workers are often analyzing critical healthcare information and processes.
The right IT personnel will be able to communicate their findings to the rest of the employees. IT personnel can also offer training and assistance to technologies that may be more difficult to use for those without a technical background. Thus, hiring healthcare IT workers with strong communication skills and the ability to work in team settings will provide a more unified atmosphere. In turn, the employees will better able to work together on efficiency solutions.
5. Apply healthcare IT to patient experiences.
Improving patient experience is a common goal among most healthcare facilities. The difficulty healthcare administrators face is that there often seems to be too many areas at to try and improve at once.
Big data often reflects trends in inefficiency and failures that healthcare analysts could identify and express to the administration and other employees. Asset management solutions, for example, can improve patient wait times as well as assess which rooms and equipment best suit a patient’s needs. By managing patient resources better, healthcare facilities can also increase the number of admissions and patient visits.
The possibilities are endless when the right medical team comes together. Let an HIT recruiter like 1st Solution USA help you the find the best employees for your facility. Call us at (972) 999-1677 or complete our contact form to improve your hiring process today.