Evergreen & IG Health Bring Solutions in Support of the Healthcare Industry

Evergreen and Insight Global Health (IG Health) were at the Becker’s Health IT + Digital Health + RCM Annual Meeting this year highlighting our solutions in support of healthcare and how we can transform your healthcare needs.

While there, IG Health and Evergreen showed healthcare professionals and providers how we can support their missions, from staffing to managed services to culture consulting.

ISSUES FACING THE HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY

Today, healthcare providers spend 50% of their operating budget on labor costs.  Despite this massive  budget, around a quarter of hospital networks are facing critical personnel shortages and healthcare professionals are burning-out at alarming rates.

What may have worked in the past is not working today, and changing how we think about workforce management can be hard.  However, we need to figure it out because creating better workforce management solutions now is the way we drive success for the healthcare industry in the future.

This is vital, too, because the United States could face vital shortages in the near future that affect patient well-being:

• Demand for healthcare workers is far outstripping supply and has caused a 37% increase in labor cost across the provider space.
• The significant increase in labor cost is driving down operating margins and affecting hospitals’ ability to execute on critical projects.
• The disparity between supply of and demand for healthcare professionals is only going to become more acute.
  • By 2025, the U.S could be short 200,000 to 450,000 nurses.
  • By 2026, we could be short a total of 3.2 million healthcare workers.

But while these problems are pervasive, they are solvable. Here are the four primary areas in which Evergreen can drive solutions in support of the healthcare industry.

TALENT MANAGEMENT

Evergreen’s Talent Optimization and Management Practice is purpose-built to help solve the workforce management issues facing the healthcare industry today.

We home in on three tactics in order to improve providers’ workforce management:

• Re-designing recruiting and building new talent pipelines to address supply challenges currently plaguing the industry.
• Re-skilling the existing workforce and provide pathways for career advancement to address skill gaps.
• Retaining talent.  We know providers are battling intense competition for labor, burn-out and retirement.  It is imperative we define employee engagement strategies to reduce attrition.

REVENUE CYCLE MANAGEMENT

Revenue cycle management (RCM) includes the healthcare provider’s entire back-end processes from when a patient first registers for treatment, to when the final bills have been paid for that treatment, and every patient interaction in between.

While there are some elements of RCM that we leave to the medical providers, such as patient treatment, charge capture, utilization review, and coding, our focus is on the parts of the process that require a skilled non-clinical workforce to deliver. 

We have industry experience in doing this through programs that include:

• Building and managing teams that are focused on interacting with patients during the RCM phases (similar to a call center, though we call these customer care centers).
• Organizing the deployment of messages such as reminders for appointments, referral programs, or communications in regards to campaigns like open enrollment. We can oversee the teams that build and deploy these messages as well as those who interact with the end users for them.
• Facilitating telehealth operations to optimize the overall RCM process.

INTEROPERABILITY

While connecting systems across healthcare networks is difficult, it is a commonplace IT challenge with commonplace IT solutions. No special tools are needed, and no deep clinical knowledge is required. Hospital networks need to focus on creating their own internal data repository and they need to do it with the most open and compatible technologies available.

There are plenty of vendors working to sell you their tool. That’s not necessary. You don’t need to cure all of your data disparity issues, you just need a data repository that can grow with you.

Accomplishing this inside your network provides immediate wins, such as better patient experience and higher confidence in care. A primary example of this is from the Veterans Affairs office which showed a 14% increase in patient satisfaction after deploying an integrated viewer of multiple electronic health records.

But research also shows that attention to this problem is hard to maintain. We saw a heavy focus in data and software engineering skillsets in 2020. Those roles have taken a big dip since then, with providers scrambling to resolve workforce management issues on the clinical side.

While this problem is pervasive, it is not insurmountable. We are experienced in the following solutions, all of which can drive increased interoperability:

• App Modernization enables the movement of applications’ backends to better data platforms that allow for easier integration.
• Data Engineering allows us to build data pipelines, data warehouses, and ETL/ELT solutions.
• Asset Data Engineering gives our team the opportunity to assess all asset inventory and ensure data meets all internal or legal requirements.

DATA PRIVACY

Between the pandemic, ongoing digital transformations, cybercrime, and new transparency rules, it has become increasingly difficult for healthcare organizations to remain compliant with healthcare regulations.

Some of the biggest data privacy violations come from employees themselves who aren’t properly trained and therefore are unaware they are even committing a violation. Other common issues occur when there is a failure to perform an organization-wide risk analysis or manage security risks.

These issues can cause financial and logistical nightmares for healthcare organizations—but organizations can become more wholly compliant while remaining focused and productive.

No matter what issues a healthcare provider might be experiencing when it comes to data privacy, we have different solutions to check all boxes which include:

• Managing security, networks, or general operations to ensure they are HIPAA compliant
• Modernizing applications to ensure they have the most updated security features available
• Evaluating your existing processes to help improve healthcare regulation understanding and compliance across your workforce

SOLUTIONS IN SUPPORT OF HEALTHCARE!

We can affect the lives of patients and healthcare workers with guided solutions at all levels of the healthcare industry.

If you weren’t able to attend Becker’s Annual Meeting, but still want to get in contact,  reach out for any staffing support here. 

And for any needs that go beyond staffing, including the four areas listed above, reach out to Evergreen’s subject matter experts for solutions in support of healthcare here: