Leveraging Technology to Improve Healthcare

1. WHAT ARE SOME OF THE SIGNIFICANT CHALLENGES AND TRENDS THAT HAVE BEEN IMPACTING THE HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY LATELY?

The three challenges and trends that seem to be most prevalent — from my perspective — are labor challenges, increased pricing pressure, and employee engagement.

Labor challenges — While some employees are beginning to return to work in critical departments, we are still seeing significant shortages in staffing levels.

The combination of increasing competitive wages and staff burnout continues to play a major role in job openings in support services such as housekeeping and food and nutrition services.

Increased financial pressure — In line with labor challenges, hospitals and health systems have seen a massive increase in payroll demands with market wages rising to unprecedented levels.

They’re also getting hit from all sides with rising costs. Capturing reimbursements is increasingly challenging in an evolving regulatory environment and a progression towards value-based care and risk-based models.

Rising inflation and ongoing supply chain issues also contribute to rising costs and a lack of availability.

Employee engagement — If rising costs and labor shortages weren’t enough, the staff onsite at hospitals continue to struggle through the effects of long hours, overtime pressure, and burnout.

Although staff in Healthcare tend to have more employer loyalty based on the value of providing care, it’s become increasingly difficult to keep employees engaged in their day-to-day activities.

2. WHAT KEEPS YOU UP AT NIGHT WHEN IT COMES TO SOME OF THE MAJOR PREDICAMENTS IN THE HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY SPACE?

The constant battle between rising inflation on goods and increasing market wages places a lot of pressure on hospitals and vendors like HHS. We obviously still need to ensure that quality outcomes are achievable, which puts a lot of pressure and tension on all parties.

However, on the bright side, this is forcing us to get more creative and innovative in our approach.

While the dynamics of our industry have notably shifted in the last 24 months, we have seen an improvement in collaboration between vendor and hospital on generating real solutions that are moving the needle.

3. CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT THE LATEST PROJECT THAT YOU HAVE BEEN WORKING ON AND WHAT ARE SOME OF THE TECHNOLOGICAL AND PROCESS ELEMENTS THAT YOU LEVERAGED TO MAKE THE PROJECT SUCCESSFUL?

To continue providing high-quality services to our Healthcare partners, we were forced to think and act differently. How can we become more efficient with reduced staff? What can we do to more quickly identify bottlenecks in our operations? How can we effectively do more with less?

Working in true collaboration with operations experts, corporate departments, and our technology team, we quickly deployed a cloud-based technology platform that intelligently automates processes and ad-hoc tasks to our onsite employees.

By putting information in our team members’ hands throughout our hospitals, we can quickly get the right person, to the right place, to execute the right task.

This technology has allowed us to operate more efficiently while achieving better outcomes. But, more importantly, it’s reduced the time requirements that typically burdened clinical and nursing departments who work in collaboration with these support service departments (such as housekeeping, patient transport, and foodservice).

A major benefit of infusing technology into these service lines was our ability to now provide real-time visibility, reporting, and analytics to our management team and hospital leadership.

We have real data at our fingertips now that tells us exactly what we’re doing well and what we need to improve on.

4. WHICH ARE SOME OF THE TECHNOLOGICAL TRENDS WHICH EXCITE YOU FOR THE FUTURE OF THE HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY SPACE?

The support service world is a very labor intensive market in Healthcare. The continued development of artificial intelligence, autonomous robotics, and IoT device acceptance will significantly impact our service lines in the near future.

With labor challenges, inflation, and employee engagement continuing to create obstacles in the industry, the further acceptance and development in these areas will lead to reduced burnout in our employees and better outcomes for our partners.

5. HOW CAN BUDDING AND EVOLVING COMPANIES REACH YOU FOR SUGGESTIONS TO STREAMLINE THEIR BUSINESS?

The best way is probably to connect on LinkedIn. You can find me here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derek-kissos/

Anyone’s welcome to shoot me a connection request and a message, and we can set up a call.