Medical Practices Amid Rising Demand For Hybrid Work Model in 2022

Increasing Demand For Hybrid Work Model needs A New Infrastructure.

This article was initially published by Illumination on Medium!

The recent COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the healthcare landscape in many ways. Nevertheless, it significantly impacted the work environment and human resources.

The pandemonium of the 2020 pandemic forced many medical practices to adopt Telehealth and virtual medical care modalities to stay in business or economically ahead of the game. During the lockdown, unless clinically required, all staff worked remotely.

Interestingly, even after the lockdown, some workers in various departments with nonclinical roles continued working from a remote location. The latter comprises call centers, billing and coding, information technology, accounting and finance, and human resources. The latter was according to MGMA Stat poll 2022.

The poll saw that a large portion of employees (59%) of various medical practices shift workers to hybrid work. The study also suggests that a hybrid work model enhanced employee retention, performance, productivity, and efficiency. Furthermore, hybrid work modern helped reduce overhead costs for medical practices and offered more alternative and convenient care options for patients.

The Conventional Hybrid Work Models Are Limited

Their infrastructure and logistics restrict the orthodox hybrid approach. There are limitations to current Telehealth and virtual work systems regarding employees and patient engagement, according to the MGMA Stat poll.

Tracking staff productivity for numerous practice administrators is a concern when taking a hybrid approach and employees working remotely. The study contributes fault in productivity to cultural factors.

Indeed, medical practice productivity depends on the activity level of their personnel. That, in turn, stays in the faith of their staff, the culture they follow within their personal space, and their work environment in general.

It is also true that one can measure engagement and productivity through well-established measurable metrics or indicators. But, then again, the primary issue is that remote work comes with sundry obstacles of its own that, without a proper infrastructure is hard to create a fruitful engagement.

When the team of medical staff is personally present in the facility, they have the opportunity and the benefit of human touch and shared emotion daily, thus can engage better.

Medical staff onsite enjoy orientation in three-dimensional space and real-time concerning their environments and coworkers. That is something that the current healthcare cyber logistic infrastructure doesn’t offer. In fact, in 2020, Deloitte studied the future of work and the workplace in healthcare. The result suggested that 59% of the survey participants believed their ability to generate rapport with their coworkers was feeble during remote work, undermining their productivity, innovation, and collaboration.

Unlike employers in many other industries, medical practices have found themselves at the doorsteps of the future work model, which offers some form of remote virtual work option to their staff. Yet, the prevailing solutions have certain shortcomings that we need to consider.

The answer to those shortfalls is in the logistics.

The disconnect or lack of optimal engagement is the upshot of what I can describe as the current virtual platforms do not follow the same workflow process as the facility. Hence they are constantly alienated from personal emotions, time, and physical orientation with onsite work.

Any efficient hybrid work model also demands a robust hybrid logistic infrastructure. The latter is a system where the virtual user experience and workflow match and parallel that of in-person or onsite workflow. Such infrastructure is a Cyber-Physical-Human System (CPHS) that accommodates flowless Real-time medical staff collaboration over an interactive and transparent virtual environment.

The CPHS helps slim away the close and trust gap by simulating the in-person office workspace orientation the employees are used to across the clinic workspace.