Healthcare and Technology Bridging the Patient/Healthcare Worker Gap

Unfortunately, it is hard to find a family who is not struggling to find adequate healthcare services for a loved one. The numbers tell the story. There are seventy-five million baby boomers, and 10,000 retire each day. These retirees are creating a void in the workforce and increasing the load on current workers as more services are needed for these retirees. In fact, 6.5 million healthcare professionals will permanently leave their positions by 2026, while only 1.9 million will step in to replace them.

Something has got to give. Or, more accurately, many things are already starting to give when it comes to healthcare in our country. Longer wait times for help. Less contact with actual humans. Fewer efficiencies. Fewer services…or compassion.

The healthcare industry has had to turn to less educated/trained individuals to deliver services in order to keep up with demand. And this is where the rubber meets the road…or doesn’t. Healthcare companies that lack the tools and discipline to train their new, under-educated healthcare workers end up doing a disservice to their patients, directly threatening their health and quality of life.

HOWEVER, THERE IS HOPE. Technology is bridging the gap—helping fewer workers with fewer skills do more for their patients. Intake forms, health assessments, testing, and self-help portals have all become smarter and more effective with new technology. This cuts down on inefficient bureaucracies, increases the accuracy of data collected, and frees up time for more skilled healthcare workers to care for their patients.

I have the good fortune to work at one of these tech companies that is pushing the boundaries when it comes to healthcare initiatives. Youreka Labs is a smart forms application on the Salesforce platform. Our work within the healthcare industry with customers has opened my eyes to the future of patient care.

Let’s look at the assessment piece of the puzzle. I have seen many of our customers at Youreka create dynamic and actionable forms that really move the needle when it comes to assessing their new patients and putting next-step automation in place. These assessments are targeted to the patient by using conditional logic so that the healthcare worker only asks relevant questions to a particular patient. So, a twenty-page assessment becomes five pages as non-relevant questions never surface to be asked.

The use of smart technologies can also help a clinician triage a patient quickly and efficiently—so that the important work of healing and taking care of people’s health needs can begin. One way this can occur is by bringing relevant personal and historical data to our Youreka forms from Salesforce, where the patient’s healthcare records live. This allows the forms to be prepopulated with important information, helps target the questioning even more, and is an easy way to check and update records when they become outdated. Second, the data collection process is smart. These forms guide the front-line clinician, not only to targeted questions, but also to conclusions about next steps based on the patient’s answers. Lastly, automation is key to this entire process. Making the “next steps” and “conclusions” about the assessment more actionable and automated ensures that the patient will get the help they need faster and more accurately. Once submitted, these forms send tasks to various stakeholders that tell them what needs to be done and how urgent the task is based on how questions are answered out in the field. Even the dreaded task of accurate insurance coding can be handled with ease. This new, smarter, data collection instrument picks up the slack for an industry that can’t afford to have miss-steps…not with our family members.

Another place this smart technology tool is effective in this market is in the area of health testing, whether self-administered or undertaken by a care worker. The UK government case study during the Covid pandemic is a great example of this.

Initially, they used over 3,500 caseworkers to go door to door testing Covid patients and collecting data about their symptoms, demographics, and recovery progress, among other relevant data. A staggering 5.5 million Youreka forms were filled out in the first two years of the pandemic. However, the sheer volume of the effort and toll on the healthcare workers during the health crisis was taking its toll. So, a self-serve portal was created to expertly, compassionately, and educationally walk patients through the process of logging their own information. The revised project was a huge success. In the final year of the Covid epidemic, 3.1 million Youreka forms were completed online by patients. This translated to 1,200 forms submitted per hour—staggering. Furthermore, the information collected helped the government better understand the trajectory of the pandemic.

Our team at Youreka has been so proud to help collect data from some of the most rural areas in England, with ever-shifting governmental priorities and guidelines keeping us on our toes with the make-up of the forms to be filled out. It was an extremely eye-opening experience to understand and champion the efforts of a governmental health agency that always has to be conscience of the multitudes of languages within its borders, the use of specific font sizes and colors for people with sight disabilities, appropriate nomenclature, and above all else security protocols to keep the entire system of data collection safe and secure.

Testing and data collection in this manner, whether by a healthcare worker or by the patient, has shown to be impactful for the individual as well as develop better data analysis for the greater society. ?This case study has shown that Youreka’s dynamic forms has allowed the UK government to effectively learn about its population’s health and wellbeing at a time when this information was crucial to creating and setting policy.

The world has been moving towards telehealth for a while. The need, due to an aging population and smaller workforce, makes this inevitable. Covid certainly sped up this process exponentially. And we are just starting to learn the possibilities for this type of technology. But, one thing is for sure, more efficient and actionable data collection like found in Youreka’s app, greases the wheels for a more efficient healthcare system so that we as a society can do more with less.