It is often said that an organization’s greatest asset is its staff. In an increasingly competitive jobs market hospitals and health insurers are competing to recruit from a small pool of highly qualified staff. As a result, there needs to be an increased emphasis on investing in staff in the same way organizations invest in other essential resources.  

Staff recruitment and retention is therefore a key challenge for healthcare organizations if they are to meet the increasing demand for services. Staff want better terms and conditions, not just in terms of remuneration but also in terms of work-life balance and job satisfaction. Technology can make a huge difference to an employee’s sense of job satisfaction and therefore improve staff retention and their overall well-being.

Automation of mundane tasks

Healthcare has been a laggard in technology terms and this has resulted in a large amount of paper and manual tasks as part of employees’ everyday work in hospitals or healthcare insurers.  Healthcare billing is plagued by a large number of repetitive manual tasks meaning that highly skilled billing administrators waste time completing relatively low-value tasks. New API (Application Programme Interface) technologies allow integrations into existing IT systems meaning that tasks such as completing health insurer forms can now be automated so that highly skilled billing administrators and adjudicators can concentrate on higher-value tasks such as payment integrity and ensuring that contracts are adhered to.  

Transparency

Healthcare is challenging, not only in its complexity but also because of the lack of transparency in the system. This makes apparently simple tasks such as checking which tests and treatments a patient may have had during their admission, time-consuming and prone to errors. New advances such as cloud computing make it possible to allow all stakeholders to access relevant data on a common platform.  Access control levels (ACLs) ensure that confidentiality and privacy are maintained meaning that staff only have access to the data relevant to their role in the organization.  

Interoperability

Legacy IT systems in hospitals often operate in silos meaning staff have to repeatedly switch between various IT systems to complete tasks. This is frustrating and time-consuming and leads to errors when information is being transcribed from one system to the other. It is estimated that approx. 6-9% of all healthcare claim forms contain errors and these errors increase the cost of adjudication for insurers and lead to bad debts on the provider side. By drawing data from different sources into a single database, errors are eliminated and staff access required information in one location saving time, increasing productivity, and freeing up time for staff to concentrate on higher-value tasks to the benefit of patients.  

Industries such as banking and entertainment have already been disrupted by technology and healthcare will be no different. New technologies have demonstrated their power to improve people’s lives by eliminating time-wasting activities and organizations who invest in improving the working lives of their staff will gain a competitive advantage by retaining their greatest resource: their staff.  

Hospitals are losing 6-9% of their revenue due to leakages in the billing process. MedoSync stops these leakages by creating the invoice in real-time and ensures hospitals get paid in full.

I am taking more time for reflection and writing up posts related to MedoSync’s areas of expertise: medical billing, healthcare, technology, and being a start-up in that ecosystem.

Want to learn more about MedoSync, connect with me on LinkedIn or visit our business profile on LinkedIn.

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