Reclaim Your Clinicians' Time

Len Hom
Director, Product Marketing, Omnicell

One of the most significant challenges facing businesses today is staffing, with healthcare particularly hard hit. Almost every healthcare sector has been plagued by a lack of qualified workers, as more than 524,000 jobs have been lost since the COVID-19 pandemic. This is not a new problem. However, pandemic burnout and other job pressures are increasing staff turnover.

In a recent survey, Hospital CEOs' top concern wasn't finances for the first time in almost a decade. It's now about labor shortages. These CEOs anticipate that a lack of labor will result in slower care delivery, restricted access to care, and lower revenue.

So how do we navigate this new normal? It's time to reclaim your clinicians' time by optimizing your medication management infrastructure to improve workflow and efficiency. Streamlining workflows can create more engaged nurses and staff, resulting in better patient care and outcomes.

Automating the pharmacy does not mean that employees are being replaced. All parties benefit when pharmacists can focus on more valuable activities using technology. Pharmacy professionals want to use their expertise and skillsets for direct patient care.

A pharmacy that embraces technology eliminates time-consuming, error-prone processes, allowing workers to employ their skills. The result is a more accurate and efficient pharmacy. And pharmacists can help to support thinly stretched staff by providing support in areas like medication instruction, chronic condition counseling, and other care initiatives.

The Great Resignation is an economic trend where employees have been voluntarily resigning. It has brought to light the nursing workforce crunch. As a result, nurses are becoming an increasingly essential part of the workforce. Compared to a decade ago, nurses are reporting they plan on leaving the force at a higher rate, according to a recent survey by consulting firm McKinsey. Nearly 30 percent of the responding nurses indicated that they were likely to leave their current role in direct patient care, with many suggesting that they intended to quit altogether. By 2030, more than 1 million nurses are expected to retire, yet nursing licenses are only growing at a rate of 4 percent per year.

It's no secret that stress and burnout are significant contributors to the nursing drain. However, a recent survey of hospital nurses discovered that manual activities were the primary source of irritation. As manual tasks and process bottlenecks burden the nursing workforce, it is essential to focus on ways to improve productivity and give nurses more time to focus on patients.

You might gain benefits such as improved functionality and efficiency for clinical employees by having a simple analysis of current use and workflows connected to medication management at the point of care (both on patient floors and in operating rooms). Here are some of the most critical areas where significant progress can be made:

• Enabling remote medication selection in the electronic health record (EHR) through interoperability
• Automation of the controlled substance management process
• Closed-loop integration to improve medication accountability
• Operating room (OR) technology optimization

You can learn more at Omnicell.com about how an intelligent infrastructure and an Autonomous Pharmacy can change how you handle medication management.

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Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company. Assumptions made in the analysis are not reflective of the position of any entity other than the author(s). These views are always subject to change, revision, and rethinking at any time and may not be held in perpetuity.