How to Alleviate Workforce Crisis in Healthcare?

On Friday 9th June, I participated in the HIMSS Europe Session about ““The Role of Tech and AI in Alleviating the Workforce Crisis”. ?I participated in the session as #Workforce #crisis is one of the important and urgent topics in the #healthcare world right now. This provided me the opportunity to the share some insights about the topic and my takeaways from that session.?

Just to highlight how acute the problem is here are some numbers about the burnout and attrition rates around the different geographies around the world.

• According to USA today/Ipsos Poll, about half (52%) report feeling “burned out”, while 23% (2022) felt that likely to leave their role soon.
• In UK, about 27000 of the entire workforces quite NHS in 2021, with most mentioned the reason as job pressures, COVID pandemic and poor patient care.
• But the situation in the other parts of the word is even worse, for example in China, prevalence of Chinese medical staff exposed to at least one burnout symptom was 60.8%, relatively higher than western countries.
• In Singapore, average attrition in the healthcare workforce was 9.8% from 2019-2022.

How to #solve workforce crisis in the healthcare system around the world

The health systems around the world should think holistically about how optimize and improve the current situation around the workforce crisis, the health systems around the globe could adopt 3 main #strategies: 1) more #automation to reduce #clinical #workload; 2) improve the #operationalefficiency; 3) improve the #supply side.??

More Automation to Reduce #Clinical #workload

• #generativeai was identified as a key technology that can enhance #workforce #efficiency by automating repetitive tasks and eliminating the need for manual data entry.
• Kaveh Safavi from #accenture mentioned that clinicians spend significant amount of manual work on data entry. He stated that “while technology has helped in healthcare, it has also resulted in a significant amount of manual work for clinicians to enter structured information and has contributed to the workforce crisis in the industry”. #largelanguagemodels were presented as a solution to recharacterize documents and reduce clinicians' tasks by approximately 20%.Also, other technologies such as #virtualhealthcare, such as telehealth and remote patient monitoring, and Radiology Operations Command Center | Philipssuch as #philips Radiology Operations Command Center (ROCC), have great potential to reduce clinical workload.

2. Improve #operationalefficiency

• Documentation challenges and the need for better communication and collaboration within the workforce were highlighted.
• #generativeai was identified as a transformative technology that can address the workforce crisis by reducing the time spent on documentation tasks.
• The session emphasized the importance of transforming #electronicmedicalrecords into user-friendly interfaces that integrate seamlessly into clinicians' #workflows, allowing them to focus more on #patientcare.

3) Improve the Supply Side

• Kaveh Safavi emphasized the need to re-evaluate and redistribute all jobs as new ones to achieve a #sustainable #businesscase.Redesigning work and #changemanagement management were identified as critical factors for success in addressing the #workforce #crisis.
• The session highlighted the #collaboration between humans and technology in recreating the future job market and redesigning the way current jobs are performed.

Recommendations

Continuous #education and training programs were recommended to #upskill and #reskill healthcare professionals in #AI and #technology.

User-friendly interfaces for AI systems were emphasized to facilitate widespread adoption and maximize the benefits of AI in healthcare.

By implementing these strategies and recommendations, healthcare organizations can effectively alleviate the workforce crisis, enhance workforce efficiency, and improve #patientcare #outcomes.