Top Trends Impacting Healthcare in 2022

February 4, 2022

By Kurt Sinnett, VP Strategy and Business Development

Given the twists and turns of the last few years it’s important to take a moment at the beginning of 2022 to understand the current environment and the trends we’re facing. As the ViClarity team works with our clients across Europe and North America, four critical trends have risen to the top of our healthcare conversations. Below is a summary of what these leading healthcare organizations are focusing on as we move into 2022:   

1. Staffing:  If you are currently working in healthcare, you will not be surprised to see staffing at the top of our list. Staffing is an issue across all sites of care regardless of the size of your hospital system or long-term care organization.  2021 showed the unique stress on healthcare workers over the last two years has hit every position from frontline staff to CEOs. As a result of high turnover, there are concerns that staff knowledge and activity related to processes and procedures are not sufficiently documented to handle these departures. Organizations are looking at ways to remove as much non-clinical work from staff and automating workflows wherever possible. When evaluating possible solutions, our partners have focused on the simple implementation process, easy onboarding for end-users, and one click reporting and data analysis for administration.   Ensuring that the automated system you implement is simple for all staff to use has been top of mind in this environment where the workload is surging, and complicated electronic documentation is often cited as a pain point.

2. Work environment:  The need to recognize staff safety, patient safety and the impact the pandemic is having on their mental health is challenging to say the least.  The stories of upset patients and family members during the past 24 months has been astounding to hear.  Many organizations are now posting signs asking for patients and visitors to show patience and kindness to the healthcare staff.  As the pandemic continues to put significant strain on healthcare workers and create unforeseen issues, consider your reporting systems to capture complaints and incidents from both staff and patients. Aggregating incident reports to identify common themes can help stay ahead of larger issues in this dynamic environment.  

3. Home care, virtual visits and remote patient monitoring: One small silver lining of the pandemic is that individuals are more open to using online resources such as access to online scheduling, email communication with providers and home delivery of medications. All parties involved are now working to become more comfortable with online resources in this new environment.   This shift in “site of care” continues to provide alternative work arrangements for nurses, therapists and administrators. But it also means process standardization and compliance monitoring are being adapted to allow for remote usage.  

4. Technology:  Technology has been an underlying current across all these trends. The role it plays in filling the need to adapt to the new challenges can’t be overstated.  As a result, our conversations with CIO’s and Compliance officers continue to focus on oversight of the organization’s operations and automating manual processes through technology.  As a chief compliance officer from a west coast health system shared, “I spend 6 hours a month aggregating data from disparate systems to create the monthly board report.”  Efficiencies by collecting and monitoring operational data on to an integrated platform has become a core focus.  As integrated technology is implemented, all different departments such as quality, compliance and operations teams can collectively work on efficiencies and identify gaps across the organization. The ViClarity Time Savings Calculator has shown up to a 60 percent reduction in administrative time once manual processes become automated.   When considering technology, review the time spent gathering data from different spreadsheets and look for interconnected solutions to avoid silos.  You will soon begin to see the potential in automating your workflows. 

Based on all the trends above, 2022 will be a year focused on solutions through technology to help fill gaps, save time and ensure effective monitoring of the healthcare organization operations.

Services performed by ViClarity are compliance and not legal in nature, and do not form an attorney-client relationship or any of the protections attendant to the attorney-client relationship.