What Will Shape Your Healthcare Facility’s Future?
After a year like no other, what healthcare trends are likely to emerge in 2021? How will they affect hiring for healthcare jobs?
Your nurses, travel nurses, and healthcare staff had a grueling 2020, to say the least. You have been at the forefront in the fight against a shattering pandemic. Are things about to change for the better, or are there more disappointments ahead with new coronavirus variants entering into society?
In this article, we look at the way the healthcare industry is shaping up to tackle COVID-19 and move beyond the pandemic in 2021. Are your hiring policies prepared?
Smart Hospitals
Automation and information are two crucial elements in the future of healthcare. The more effectively and efficiently they are delivered, the faster your facility can become the smart hospital it urgently needs to be.
Smart technology (including cameras and speakers) will allow your nurses and telehealth practitioners to virtually monitor patients to predict and prevent potentially adverse occurrences more fluidly. It will also free up your nurses for the fundamental tasks that smart technology cannot replicate.
With relief needed for healthcare services during this grueling pandemic, a hospital with smart technology will find resources can be used more proficiently, and patient care will excel. Consequently, healthcare staff will suffer less burnout, leading to increased staff retention and greatly improved performance.
Hands-Free Communication
Communication is crucial in providing adequate care to patients. But every time a nurse must leave a room to fetch supplies, speak with a colleague, or answer a call, costly PPE must be binned and replaced with new PPE before re-entering. This is a cost on time and resources – two things healthcare is short of, and cannot afford to lose.
Enter hands-free communication technology. Healthcare facilities are investing in voice-controlled devices that can be worn underneath PPE, allowing travel nurses and healthcare professionals to communicate without leaving their position and jeopardizing cross-infection control.
Data Analytics
Interest in patient care and health practitioner safety no longer rests squarely on healthcare providers alone.
Technology providers and organizations are joining forces with the world of healthcare, creating ways to identify patterns and solutions to predicted outcomes before they occur.
The result will be a promising and exciting future of automated and increasingly accurate data analysis, that not only adheres to each state’s laws and regulations, but also allows you to identify your facility’s biggest pain points – from workflow, to staff burnout, to finances.
Ensure your nurses are trained well in data analytics. Invest in their training and ability to understand the data to reap its huge advantages in your facility.
Remote Healthcare
Healthcare has previously been slow to follow the trend of providing a service remotely, but the pandemic of 2020 has changed this. There has been massive progress and uptake in telehealth services.
In 2019, 11% of patients accessed healthcare services virtually. In 2020, this rocketed to 46%. With cloud-enabled technologies and increased workloads, remote healthcare is becoming a huge part of operating a successful healthcare facility.
Blockchain
There are two major ways blockchain is going to create solutions to healthcare:
- For the first time, blockchain will allow patients to manage their own personal health data through blockchain apps.
Currently, patient data is fragmented. It is held in various sources and kept in different ways, completely blocking a patient’s ability to create a holistic view of their own health status – something healthcare professionals always promote.
Blockchain apps will allow patients real-time, secure access to their own medical information.
- Blockchain technology will enable more efficient use of clinical research data to develop pharmaceutical products more transparently.
Currently, such data may not be accurately recorded, and may even be fabricated – but blockchain technology will prevent this, with auditable tracking of datasets from clinical researchers. The result? Approved drugs that produce better outcomes for both patients and healthcare providers.
The Growing Need for Wellbeing in Healthcare Environments
The least technical, yet most effective and powerful solution to a better future in healthcare: the recognition of wellbeing of your nurses and healthcare staff.
We’re all aware of the agonizing strain the pandemic has placed on providers, and especially the staff. Their working conditions have become increasingly dangerous. They’ve had fewer resources – from PPE, to shared equipment, to advice, to colleagues – when they needed more. They’ve struggled with the emotional burden of providing caring, professional services, at devastating levels that are yet to recover.
Healthcare providers must focus on the wellbeing of their nurses to:
- Increase staff retention
- Improve quality of care
- Reduce burnout
- Reduce staff absence
- Reduce recruitment costs
- Encourage travel nurses to enroll
The wellbeing of your employees is critical to the provision of advanced care for your patients. We don’t know what the future yet holds with regards to the pandemic, but we do know that the focus must be set on the healthcare professionals who face the grueling effects head on.
Summary
Healthcare providers in the United States are adjusting to major breakthroughs in how care is provided. From smart bedside technology to PPE-saving communication, to powerful data and virtual consultations, to patient choices at their fingertips, we have a stronger, healthier, more knowledgeable healthcare system in our sights. Make sure your healthcare facility and your staff are a part of it.
For your staffing needs in a rapidly changing world of healthcare, contact Loyal Source today.