Healthcare in the United States is going through a major shift both in how care is performed and funds are funneled. These changes keep hospital administrators up at night and the rest of America on antacids. What’s the number one thing on a CEO’s/president’s mind? The need to appease all constituencies*, both internal and external, and save enough resources to demonstrate his/her value. Well, I have a sleeping pill for him and a treatment for what ails our healthcare industry – I’m pretty sure it lies somewhere in the vastness of the IT universe.
In the next few entries, we will offer our insight, as it relates to our expertise – IT. We feel technology is the panacea for…yeah, EVERYTHING. So, healthcare is, of course, no exception. Here are but a few of the problems facing the healthcare industry, and our (far out, yet, abbreviated) answer to it.
Aging patients. In the next decade, 28% of the US population will turn 65 or older. When a large pocket of society retires, the impact to the workforce can be devastating. Not to mention, adding the increased medical requirements of the aging to the fact that an already over-burdened government-backed Medicaid and Medicare system will have to take on a vastly expanded and recently unemployed (due to retirement) population, and you have a medical system that, if we study history – or Japan—and we follow this telling trend to its logical conclusion, will be overtaxed and underpaid.
What must the men and women of HospitalAdminGalaxia be thinking? “Reduce costs now: Streamline processes to reduce the bureaucratic strain of increased government supplements and preempt additional regulation.”
Leaner, physician-run competitors are on the rise. With smaller shops eating into profits by charging less and proving more efficient because of lower costs and leaner operations, hospital margins are being reduced drastically. Couple the competitive disadvantage handed by these mini-care facilities to the shortage of quality healthcare professionals and an increase in uninsured patients – spurned mostly by a slowly improving economy – and caps on insurance reimbursement, American hospitals are not only hemorrhaging financially, they are unable to properly and efficiently address the needs of those in most need of treatment.
What, again, must the people of HospitalAdminGalaxia be thinking? “Reduce costs now: Increase efficiency and attractiveness of our hospital so we can attract and retain young and impatient, tech savvy medical professionals.”
Have no fear, IdM, the superhero we affectionately term Mighty-M, is here. As we discussed in our July 9, entry, identity access and management systems (IdM) allow administrators to design secure, automatic access approval and password retrieval. Provisioning auto settings helps reduce costs, increase efficiency, and mitigate employee fatigue. “Oh, but how,” you ask?
If you allow end users autonomy in the more simple, mundane areas of technology, you not only empower them and give them more control over their day, you save them the time, effort, and possible humiliation (depending on how many times they require resets and retrievals) it takes to track down an already strained and possibly hyper-annoyed helpdesk colleague. You don’t save only that Mr. Forgetful Employee’s time, you can spare the entire IT department from the constant interruption of mindless work that hinder them from completing projects of higher intelligence that actually move the galaxy along.
Our slippery slope argument may seem too steep or too slippery or both. But, truly, any business guru will tell you, when you take away the burden of the mundane, you remove the labor burden ( i.e., costs of heavy turnover, added morale boosters, and hiring more staff to complete work a smaller team could manage – thus, saving money. And all residual effects of consolidating work and minimizing roadblocks to job completion, and ultimately job satisfaction, from improving efficiency to easing employee stress, lead eventually to increasing your hospital’s bottom line. For profit or not – period.
In this entry we discuss just one of the many benefits of a properly installed and managed IdM solution. There are extensive lists of reasons why hospitals should seek out IdM’s super power. We hope to list more as the weeks progress. For now, what’ve you got? How has IdM solved your budget and employee retention problems?
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