One of the more frustrating aspects of the post-acute care delivery setting is that providers and their hard-working staff so often feel perpetually behind the eight ball. Processes are largely reactive and passive, and workflows are work-around laden given less-than-sexy technology options for specialties like Skilled Nursing and lack of appropriate funding (or motivation). Skilled Nursing professionals become highly-trained firefighters, essentially, scrambling to address patient needs with fistfuls of paperwork (at best) and complete blind spots to the rest of the patient’s story (at worst). Automation and digitizing healthcare communication, however, offer an opportunity for Skilled Nursing teams to emerge from the flames as Optimizers. Equipped with accessible solutions that meet these post-acute pros right where they are, the care delivery experience gains efficiency and, frankly, quality of life in a big way.
Burnout in Skilled Nursing is Very Real
Especially post-pandemic, being a healthcare professional is exhausting. Between regulatory requirements, reimbursement woes, complexities of patients’ conditions, socioeconomic influences on health outcomes, and constant churn of staff, it’s truly a thankless job. The post-acute care space has been hit especially hard, and Skilled Nursing in particular carries a massive load of the patient burden that is (more so than most) impacted by the very variables they have little to no funding for and/or control over, such as transportation challenges, comorbidities to manage, etc..
Because the exodus of healthcare professionals to other fields (any other field will do!), we should all consider it our “problem” to address and alleviate this systemic burnout. Capitalizing on opportunities to bring simple solutions into healthcare practices to increase support, communication, and management of patient and business data (such as billing info) should be top of mind for anyone in Healthcare IT.
And it sure as heck is for us!
Using Healthcare Connectivity to Optimize Patient Management and Care Outcomes
At the end of the day, managing patients better – from intake to completion of care – means better outcomes long-term. And this impacts entire communities when you consider the resources that poor (or at least shy-of-optimal) health drains from neighborhoods and health systems that could otherwise be thriving. It may sound lofty to suggest that something like a streamlined, automated referral management process like 360x or a user-friendly portal for skilled nursing staff to query, request, and exchange patient records could change neighborhoods, but we believe this is very true. And it’s within reach!
Removing the cumbersome experience of wrestling paper faxes and mailing health records (still super pervasive in Skilled Nursing), waiting for patients to initiate contact or close the loop on referrals, or delaying needed care due to missing information must be ways of the past. We have inexpensive tools that connect providers via their native workflows (be it in an EHR, Direct inbox, or portal interface) to empower them with better data, secure exchange and transmission of records, true referral management/tracking, and actual engagement with their larger care community.
It’s our mission to get Skilled Nursing providers out of the soot and ash of reactive, disconnected care delivery, and into a world of optimized, proactive, connected care delivery!
