Hospital organizations have continued to take a beating in a post-pandemic world. When most of the world is starting to get back to work in full swing, hospitals have found themselves in worse shape than at any other time before. It has been reported that as many as 30 percent of businesses shuttered throughout the pandemic. On the other hand, the healthcare industry shifted gears from operating with, on average, 70 percent full patient load to running at over 100 percent capacity without any additional staff or resources to compensate for the increase in business demand. This increase caused a stressed and strapped market space to accelerate the healthcare workers’ “burnout” rate.
Post-pandemic healthcare has experienced more than 10 percent of healthcare workers calling it quits. Some walked away and retired. Others decided that healthcare was not the industry they wanted to be in anymore and took their skills to other types of work. The people left behind have had to shoulder an even larger load of work than ever before. This environment is now the “new normal” for healthcare.
Additionally, the number of applicants waiting to join healthcare has not kept pace with the number of people who have left the industry. With overworked staff and full-capacity patient loads, the opportunity for mistakes and errors in the workplace has increased. Organizations that did not have any way to measure or monitor their organization’s EMR systems before the pandemic found themselves at higher risk than those that did because these systems are designed to capture these inconsistencies and prevent errors. Those with these strong intelligence systems that measure and monitor their systems have become critical.
These systems must be able to pull some of the load from the vacant position to ease the burden of those workers left behind. One set of tools that has performed at the highest level of success is Softek Panther. For example, Softek’s EMR Performance solution measures and monitors clinicians’ activities as they use their Oracle Cerner Millennium EMR system. This solution allows the IT staff to fully understand what kind of slowness or disruption the end-users are experiencing and alert them when to take corrective actions to prevent them. This alerting system means there does not need to be an assigned IT staff member constantly watching the system for newly occurring issues. The Panther system uses a notification system that monitors 24/7 and alerts the organization when an issue arises. The system only sends notifications to the desired staff when situations occur that require action. Not only is this a cost-savings, but it is a great stopgap for vacant positions or inexperienced personnel who do not naturally know how to recognize these events.
While organizations are struggling with finding talent to replace the shrinking workforce, these solutions allow the smaller staff to successfully support the clinicians and thus provide better healthcare to patients.
Another unfortunate problem exposed with talent leaving healthcare is errors in others following their workflows correctly. In other words, the key personnel who left would secretly fix others’ mistakes. With those people gone, these mistakes go uncorrected, creating new disruptions to hospital operations. This situation creates an uptick in work that the support staff must address and less revenue to collect because these issues prevent charges from being recognized by the system. Softek Panther provides a solution with its Charge Capture suite that allows the support teams to see the inconsistencies within charges based on the actual workflow.
With healthcare’s new normal, it not only makes sense but is critical to have systems that help offset these problems. Softek is committed to helping all organizations get the most out of their Millennium system.
What does Softek® do?
Softek’s mission is to help hospital systems get the most out of their investment in Oracle Cerner Millennium®. We do this by providing innovative software solutions and consulting services that can achieve more together than either can alone.
At Softek, our team of innovators and software developers brings expertise beyond the ordinary to every client. Our experts are involved with Oracle Cerner Millennium® hospitals throughout the country, consulting clients so they can optimize system performance and revenue integrity.
Softek delivers a full suite of consulting services and software solutions to assess and optimize EMR system performance, including revenue cycle integrity and patient accounting.
Softek was awarded 2021 Best in KLAS for Revenue Cycle Optimization.
Let’s talk about how you can get the most out of your Oracle Cerner Millennium® system.
