The Role of Digital Health in a Time of Staffing Shortages and Missed Revenue Targets

Hospitals continue to reel from the losses imposed by the pandemic. But is this the only key driver of missed revenue targets?

Even before COVID-19 hit, our country was facing a public health epidemic: a shortage of nurses, primary care physicians, and specialists. Aside from lowering the barrier to entry for these professionals, what solutions exist to improve patient access to healthcare? And how do we reduce the administrative bloat that has affected these institutions for decades??

Moving Departments to be Virtual-First

Forward-thinking clinics like Tia Clinic are already doing this. Starting a patient’s journey with a telehealth visit allows the system to understand individual needs before using up expensive real estate. Virtual visits have shorter wait times and are run more efficiently, allowing individual providers to better optimize case loads (number of patients that can be seen in a day). In most cases, patients appreciate this as well because it saves them the hassle of getting to the clinic, as well as sitting in the waiting room. As an example, according to an AMA’s 2021 telehealth survey of neurologists, 36% of neurology visits were done via telehealth.

Partnering with Virtual Specialty Clinics??

As a system navigates build versus buy decisions in virtual care, a key challenge is understanding which service lines require a third-party partnership versus building the virtual-first solution in-house. An in-house IT and Operations team can easily tackle straightforward conditions for a primary care department (common cold, rash, etc.), as these have relatively simple diagnosis trees and treatment paths.

Meanwhile, for more complicated, chronic conditions such as cardiovascular and neurological conditions, partnerships with focused players will allow systems to leapfrog their competition. This is largely because of the time, complexity, and scaling challenges associated with standing up these specialty-specific virtual clinics, particularly for chronic conditions. Just to name a few of the technological components to meaningfully drive efficiency:?

• Sophisticated triage algorithms to determine the level of care professional required to handle a given patient inquiry
• Condition-specific trackers to monitor symptoms
• Apps that drive meaningful engagement among patients with a particular condition
• Internal case management platform to facilitate faster diagnosis and treatment decisions, and more.

Other consideration factors include supply—if the system is facing a specialty-specific shortage and hiring challenges, a third-party virtual clinic can provide bandwidth extenders to grow and scale capacity. These are telehealth visits that help the system scale up capacity according to waitlist size and needs. By investing in cross-state licensing physicians, virtual clinics efficiently fill gaps in supply and demand. For example, if a system sees patients in Pennsylvania and New York, but most of its specialists are only licensed in Pennsylvania, the virtual partner opens up entire states’ worth of growth opportunity and referral volume.

Investing in Hybrid Care, Not Just Telehealth

While telehealth met clear gaps during the pandemic, hybrid care is a far more impactful and efficient solution for scaling health system services. Simple telehealth solutions have now become a commodity product (even Zoom is powering many video visits). Meanwhile, hybrid care entails sophisticated triage, routing, and escalation algorithms that are condition-specific. By preserving specialists’ time for complex inquiries (whether by text, message, video, or other), hybrid care platforms offer health systems an opportunity to leapfrog their competition.? As an example, imagine a prototypical chronic migraine patient’s care journey:

While a telehealth visit is a great way for an initial patient-provider relationship to form, asynchronous interactions are a better fit for the journey downstream. As this patient goes through a standard period of trial and error to understand their optimal treatment plan (usually a combination of medications and lifestyle changes), a system that alerts the care team to adverse outcomes allows for more timely intervention and requires less of a provider’s time. By leveraging hybrid care, using natural language processing to pre-populate notes, and aggregating state-agnostic supply, platforms like Neura Health can turbocharge the efficiency of neurological care delivery. Ultimately, this results in patients finding relief with speed, convenience, and quality.

Interested in learning more? Contact us to discover more about how Neura can help your neurology department efficiently scale.