Medicare recently proposed slashing physician pay. It is the latest shake-up in healthcare, an industry already suffering from significant pain points.
Industry professionals consistently cite four factors as top barriers to enterprise healthcare organizations today. They are poor patient access, excessive operating costs, staff shortages, and less-than-desirable patient outcomes.
Enterprise medical recruiting can solve these pain points. Organizations can access the talent they need to better care for patients and address rising labor and equipment costs.
In this guide, we explain the 12 reasons why a recruiting solution is the answer to all your biggest problems. Plus, find out how Hire Velocity's services can help.
1. Improving Patient Access: Expand Appointment Availability and Hours
Patient access refers to how easily consumers can get to healthcare. Much research has gone into identifying barriers to access. Transportation barriers, clinician shortages, and rural living are some of them.
Appointment availability and working hours can also restrict patient access to medical care.
Unfortunately, overcoming these barriers is not simple. Expanding your hours or offering more appointment slots may not be enough. This is especially true when you do not have the staff to work those extra hours and appointments.
Luckily, a medical recruiter can help you find the professionals you need to offer more availability. That could mean hiring doctors and nurses willing to work unconventional or emergency shifts.
Another possible solution is enhancing your enterprise's telehealth capabilities. Telehealth offers providers the flexibility to work from home. Meanwhile, patients can get the care they deserve whenever and wherever they need it.
2. Improving Patient Access: Reach More Patients With Telehealth
Speaking of telehealth, this emerging technology is not just a boon for hours and availability. Telehealth can also improve access for patients living in rural areas.
57 million Americans live in rural areas. These patients struggle with two major problems when it comes to accessing care: distance and provider shortages. A medical staffing solution can address both of these issues.
First, organizations can hire providers who are already experts in telehealth. These specialists may not require training. In fact, they may even be able to train your staff in the latest telehealth gold standards.
Second, enterprises can greatly enhance patient-to-provider ratios. In rural areas, this ratio is currently around 40 primary care physicians for every 100,000 people. This is greatly reduced from urban areas' ratio of 53 physicians per 100,000 patients.
Importantly, these shortages are no longer affecting rural areas only. Even some urban areas have begun to experience reduced patient-to-provider ratios. These are problems medical staffing solutions are ready to help solve.
3. Improving Patient Access: Boost Health Equity
Even when patients can physically get care, they may still run into barriers. A major one is discrimination. People of color and low-income individuals cannot always access optimal care due to:
- Lack of insurance
- Residing in formerly redlined communities
- Internal bias
Medical staffing agencies can't solve all of these problems. But we can help address the third issue: internal bias in healthcare staff.
One in 10 black patients report experiencing discrimination from a healthcare provider. Organizations can implement sensitivity training to address the problem. However, these training sessions are not always sufficient for eliminating internal bias.
Is discrimination an issue at your enterprise organization? If so, hiring more diverse providers may be the solution you need.
Similarly, consider investing in more social service employees. These individuals can guide your organization toward a more inclusive patient access strategy.
4. Reducing Operating Costs: Eliminate Contract Labor
From 2020 to 2022, hospital expenses grew at more than double the rate of Medicare reimbursement increases. Experts chalk this issue up to multiple factors, including the rising cost of medical supplies and equipment.
However, an even more newsworthy problem is the healthcare workforce shortage. You would think a labor shortage would drive labor costs down. But with organizations outsourcing expensive contract labor, the reverse has occurred.
Contract labor is often the only solution during a crisis. However, when organizations begin to rely on contract workers in the long term, the cost becomes exorbitant.
At the same time, filling openings is easier said than done. Healthcare workers are leaving the industry in droves. Experts believe nurse shortages, in particular, have caused a 17% increase in labor costs.
Moreover, many hospitals struggle to retain full-time staffing departments. This makes it difficult to execute searches for high-quality talent.
Rising contract labor costs are a problem in many organizations. That's why Hire Velocity offers enterprise RPO services. Recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) is a long-term solution to your healthcare staffing needs.
5. Reducing Operating Costs: Get Expert IT Talent
The HITECH Act shed light on how crucial technology is for cost-cutting in healthcare. Adopting the right systems can reduce manual processes. This, in turn, will prevent costly medical errors and promote patient access.
Yet, many organizations have failed to achieve these cost cuts. One reason for this is that they don't have the right IT talent. This may be because hospitals are hiring the wrong IT experts or due to expensive contract IT labor.
Hiring the wrong experts can wind up costing your hospital. Inexperienced IT specialists may not know how to source more affordable technology systems. Or when they do find an effective solution, they may implement it incorrectly, leading to information siloes or worse.
Some organizations may turn to contract IT specialists instead. However, these individuals may not understand the needs of healthcare enterprises like yours. They also do not have the incentives to perform well because their success is not tied to yours.
The answer? Work with an enterprise medical recruiting firm. We can find IT professionals who are a perfect fit for your needs without breaking the budget.
6. Reducing Operating Costs: Keep Up With Rebounding Demand
A vast majority of patients put off medical care during the pandemic. The good news is that demand for medical services is rebounding. But the bad news is that many hospitals are struggling to keep up.
Failing to support all these patients is a lost income opportunity. Addressing rising medical consumption may not reduce operating costs directly. But it will boost margins to free up funds for operational improvements.
Working with a recruiting firm like Hire Velocity won't just address rising demand. Yes, we can help you find more and better workers. But we can also help you design a responsive process for future hiring efforts.
Additionally, we offer full and partial-cycle recruiting. That means you can flex your staffing needs based on times of increased demand.
And as medical service consumption levels back out over the next few years, you can scale back your recruiting needs.
7. Addressing Staff Shortages: Lessen Administrative Burden
When there are fewer workers in your organization, existing employees must take on the added workload. One area where we are already seeing this happen is with administrative work.
Operations, finance, management, and strategy are not provider specialties. Yet, doctors and especially nurses must often wear these hats to keep the business running.
Rising administrative burdens are a vicious cycle. Providers who entered the field to practice medicine and care for patients are being turned off from their professions. In many cases, administrative work is causing them to leave the industry entirely.
When these workers leave, they exacerbate shortages. And the healthcare industry is not the only institution that pays the price. Enterprises like yours suffer under even larger administrative burdens.
Stop this cycle in its tracks with access to the administrative talent you need. Medical recruiting firms don't just have access to provider networks. We can also source talent for the support roles needed to make your business run effectively.
8. Addressing Staff Shortages: Alleviate Provider Burnout
Burnout is a major concern in the healthcare industry. Research shows that high administrative burdens are one of the top causes of provider and nurse burnout.
Other factors that may play a role include:
- Long work hours
- Poor work/life balance
- Increased focus on productivity
Even before the pandemic, burnout was one of the main contributors to provider and nursing shortages. Now, the problem has only gotten worse.
Unfortunately, staffing enough workers is not always sufficient to solve this problem. Instead, it is more of an employee retention issue. And employee retention often begins with the right employees.
Your recruiting strategy sets the stage for what new hires can expect. Go about this incorrectly, and you may pay the price down the line. Hire Velocity's advisory services will help you design a strategy for recruiting talent that will stick with you in the long term.
9. Addressing Staff Shortages: Cut Down on Readmissions
Readmission rates are one of the best indicators of quality and performance at a hospital.
Further, a high readmission rate can lead to unwanted side effects. These include higher costs, poor reputation, and employee dissatisfaction.
Unfortunately, high readmission rates are common in understaffed healthcare organizations. Providers may not have time to collect accurate medication histories or provide timely follow-up care. That is not even to mention making time to identify post-acute care needs.
When patients don't get the one-to-one attention they deserve, medical errors can happen. This won't just cost you in terms of money and your reputation. High readmission rates can also cost lives.
Staffing your hospital with the right executive leadership is crucial for slashing readmission rates. Having enough administrative professionals and medical providers is essential, too.
10. Boosting Patient Outcomes: Hire More Nurses
Experts have long known about the direct relationship between the number of nurses and the quality of care in hospitals. The more nurses an organization has on hand, the better the patient outcomes.
Patient outcomes share an even greater link with RNs. And this is not just a phenomenon seen at hospitals. It also occurs in retirement communities and enterprises within other health-based sectors.
Unfortunately, finding nurses and RNs is easier said than done. Experts expect the nursing shortage to continue to intensify throughout 2023 and beyond.
In fact, the shortage is expected to hit a dearth of 13 million nurses by the year 2030 as the workforce ages into retirement.
Addressing nursing shortages at your hospital now may make a difference for you in the long term. That's why it is critical to start troubleshooting your recruitment processes now.
11. Boosting Patient Outcomes: Better Track Research Breakthroughs
Research in fields like gene therapy, biotech, and digital medicine is expanding exponentially. A similar phenomenon is going on in hospital best practices, informed by what we learned from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Over the next few years, research gains are expected to increase even further. This is thanks, in part, to the unprecedented rise of artificial intelligence-powered technology.
Why does this matter for staffing? Without enough staff, clinicians may struggle to keep up with the latest best practices.
It is essential to get a handle on this issue now. If you don't, your organization may start to lag behind the competition. After all, if your hospital isn't researching the latest innovations, you can bet others in your area are.
Get the talent you need to stay on top of things with on-demand healthcare recruiting services from Hire Velocity.
12. Boosting Patient Outcomes: Improve Interoperability
Patient outcomes suffer when disparate hospital systems can't "talk" to each other. But this issue is even worse when interoperability within your own organization fails.
Interoperability refers to a technology system's ability to exchange data with other systems. Some software products are not designed to play well with others.
However, poor interoperability can also be another consequence of insufficient IT talent. Some IT professionals don't have the skills to integrate siloed systems.
If your hospital's technology can't connect and communicate, your team may miss vital information. This can often be the difference between saving and losing a life.
Stop letting interoperability issues impact your organization. Work with Hire Velocity to find the talent you need today.
Enterprise Medical Recruiting Is the Solution to Your Top Pain Points
Patient access, operating costs, staff shortages, and patient outcomes are the biggest focuses for hospitals today. Improving your recruiting processes is the best way to overcome these barriers and the critical issues they cause.
Are you ready to find the solution to your biggest pain points? Hire Velocity's enterprise medical recruiting services can help your organization climb to new heights. Contact us to start the journey.
