At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) faced humongous clinical, financial, and operational hurdles. While recruiting and retaining skilled nursing staff was a huge challenge in itself during these critical times, the intent to rapidly adapt to rapidly-evolving operational changes to ensure the safety of residents and workers didn’t help either.
In addition to these concerns, the pandemic sped up the issues (staffing, costs, growth, and census) of skilled nursing facilities. Skilled nursing facilities were literally forced to alter their standard practices and policies to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on the nursing home workforce. If this was not all, the pandemic imposed greater demands on the nursing home workforce like new control and infection-prevention measures such as rigorous testing, screening, and cohorting instituted to cut down transmission and contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus.
Direct care workers such as certified nursing assistants (CNAs), personal care aides, and licensed practical nurses (LPNs) were the worst hit. It is estimated that more than 880,000 health and care workers died across the world from COVID-19 while serving residents and others.
Add to that, the segment of Skilled Nursing Facilities (SNFs) was also hit by limited training, an increase in the level of physically-demanding work, low wages, few benefits, and limited opportunities for career advancement. All of these and many more concerns along with the increased cost of staffing and purchasing medical supplies due to nationwide lockdowns, ever-growing inflation, and huge money spent on COVID-related costs (PPE, testing, etc.) meant that healthcare institutions were running on thin margins, and continue to do so.
According to estimates, the global home healthcare market size was valued at USD 320.6 billion in 2021 and it is likely to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.9 percent from 2022 to 2030. Thankfully, the recent advancements in the segment of home healthcare services across the world have enabled the delivery of high-quality healthcare to patients and their loved ones from the comfort of their homes.
Today, healthcare organizations including skilled nursing facilities are relying on the use of technology (BI and Contact Center) to stay proactive and to efficiently drive census and understand industry trends. For instance, healthcare organizations are leveraging business intelligence to organize business, operational, and clinical data for making smarter and proactive decisions. In the United States alone, telemedicine usage grew from 0.1 percent of users in February 2020 to a staggering 43.5 percent in April 2020. If this is not all, applications that have the potential to leverage digital technologies are witnessing a massive demand and surge with every passing day.
Healthcare organizations are leveraging business intelligence to combine policies, culture, technologies, and processes to collect, manipulate, store, and analyze huge collections of data (the so-called “big data”) coming from both internal as well as external sources to create knowledge, communicate information, and facilitate informed decision-making. These insights are assisting healthcare organizations to make better decisions in the context of financial issues, suppliers, products, services, strategic issues, and competitors.
Globally, business intelligence in the healthcare sector is receiving big attention as it helps healthcare organizations save time and costs to avoid wastage of limited resources. It is also being utilized by healthcare providers to provide real-time suggestions for diagnoses, screening and management of treatment pathways, and patient management.
For instance, Enquire BI and Contact Center are assisting healthcare organizations reduce costs, increase revenue, improve patient safety, and offer better visibility into financial operations. They are also being leveraged to ensure that healthcare organizations stay compliant and monitor cash flows in seamless and cost-effective ways. Enquire BI and Contact Center are also assisting healthcare providers to collaborate in critical cases and ensure that their collaboration followed by subsequent decision-making and treatment doesn’t delay treatment in any way. Furthermore, Enquire BI and Contact Center are helping healthcare providers expedite patient care as invaluable insights can be accessed irrespective of the geographical location among different departments, healthcare providers, and Medicare facilities.
Conversely, Predictive Analytics can be leveraged by healthcare organizations to pre-empt potential medical challenges that patients may face in the future. For instance, business intelligence can be leveraged by healthcare organizations to electronically integrate and distribute patient data across different emergency room (ER) departments to considerably minimize consecutive ER visits for many patients.
In addition to these advantages, Business Intelligence (BI) is also beneficial to assist prospects in finding answers about the community (with contact center and live chat) and invest in technology to develop personalized interventions for patients as well as keep staff workload down. It can also reduce staff costs with automated workflows and outsourced personnel by as much as 23 percent.
Today, the option to have the technology and team in place to support the new era of the elderly (i.e., Contact Center/Live Chat) is not a luxury, but a necessity.
Discover how your healthcare organization can reap the optimum advantages of BI and Contact Center to provide exceptional customer experiences to your patients and their loved ones. Schedule a demo now!
