Labor shortages. Inflation. A fragile supply chain. Healthcare providers are operating in a complex landscape all while working to implement large-scale changes in an increasingly competitive and value-based environment.
Here are 6 trends that could usher in future change and some recommendations for providers on how to prepare.
1. Labor Pains: Addressing the Workforce Shortage in Healthcare
Healthcare staffing shortages will continue to create challenges in 2024, as one study projects more than 6.5 million U.S. healthcare professionals will permanently leave their positions by 2026, while only 1.9 million will step in to replace them. This will create a national shortage of more than 4 million workers.
For 2024, providers will need to reconfigure processes and weed out inefficiencies to free up scarce resources for patient care. Increasingly, this means eliminating tasks that could be delegated to non-clinical staff and automating processes that are eating into caregivers’ time. For instance, research shows that nurses spend more time documenting, coding and reviewing information in the electronic medical record (EMR) than they do on patient care (59.78 minutes per 4-hour block, versus 58.71, respectively). Automating these tasks and the right prompts during the patient encounter helps ensure accurate coding (and reimbursement) while saving hours of time in documentation and paperwork.
2. Margin Matters: Creating Healthier Bottom Lines
Price inflation and labor expenses are compromising health systems’ finances and impeding their ability to service debts, with the market reporting more than $12 billion in impaired municipal bonds – the most in the past 15 years.
To better control costs, providers in 2024 must tackle difficult-to-manage areas, standardizing purchasing to preferred suppliers to unlock deeper volume-based discounts.
In 2024, we anticipate strong interest in purchasing standardization, as well as technologies that facilitate it. For instance, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems can be used to funnel buying to approved, contracted suppliers unless allowed via a carefully documented exception process, thus hard wiring purchasing commitments into the workflow. Other technologies, such as robotic process automation (RPA), can help activate best prices for the more than 40,000 new line items managed by supply chain professionals every six months.
3. Care Decisions: AI-Enablement to Improve Quality and Advance Automation
2024 will be a year of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption to help providers automate processes and improve total outcomes. For instance, one study showed that sepsis care dramatically improved (almost two hours faster to antibiotic treatment) when enabled with an AI-powered clinical decision support (CDS) system.
AI is also needed to keep up with the pace of change. Given the advancements in personalized medicine, where evidence is built not just around a condition but down to the individual genome, providers must augment intelligence with technologies that serve up the most actionable insights at the point of care.
For 2024, providers will continue to implement foundational capabilities in AI – building business intelligence and analytic systems to assist with measurement, evaluation and predictions of future outcomes, as well as CDS integrated into the EMR to prompt evidence-based care.
4. The Freights of Wrath: Building Supply Chain Resiliency
To prevent shortages and better manage inflation, supply chains will be forced to 1) create greater diversity of supply sources and 2) get more upstream data on prices and availability.
A June 2023 Premier survey of supply chain experts found that 62 percent are multi-sourcing critical product categories for greater redundancy, and 33 percent are geographically diversifying supply sources. Many are also looking for opportunities to work with new supplier entrants that can disrupt unhealthy markets.
Additionally, Premier predicts buyers will put more pressure on trading partners to collect additional supply data, enabling greater visibility and the potential to risk score suppliers. Purchasers will also look to ERP data to get real-time signals on upticks in demand and order-to-fulfillment times. Last, more trading partners will turn to the power of AI to make smarter and faster predictions about supply needs for better preparedness.
5. Dystopian Disparities: Closing Gaps to Ensure Health Equity
Starting in 2024, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will require providers to screen and report on social drivers of health, with the goal of curbing disparate outcomes across different populations. To efficiently comply with this mandate, we predict providers will leverage tools such as natural language processing (NLP) to capture key indicators found in free text, as well as AI to develop analytics that predict social needs and overall health risks.
Providers in 2024 will also work to address gaps in care delivery. In aggregate, the National Academies of Medicine found that people of color are less likely than white counterparts to receive evidence-based kidney dialysis or transplants, cardiac care or the best care for stroke, cancer or AIDS. Many of these practice differences will be corrected using CDS systems that hardwire the evidence into the workflow, forcing clinicians to document exceptions with good reason.
6. Healthcare Hunger Games: The Race to Demonstrate Value
As consumers become directly exposed to costs through health savings accounts (HSAs) and high deductibles, more are starting to “vote with their feet,” seeking out ratings to help them determine the best providers of quality outcomes with the most value and convenience.
To remain competitive, providers need a strategy for managing total performance in a transparent, scorecard world across a host of measures that matter.
For 2024, we expect to see more scrutiny applied to quality measurement systems to generate transparent, apples-to-apples measures that better meet consumer demands. And, conversely, we expect providers to take a more active role in assessing performance across a broader range of factors to prove their total value to those paying for care. Given consumers can consult opinion research and ratings before buying virtually anything, the savvy provider will adopt ratings that provide useful measures for more informed choices.
The Bottom Line
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