In 2020, more nurses than doctors joined the healthcare provider workforce. Now, as workforce shortages continue and healthcare organizations struggle to meet patient care demands, industry experts say strategically combining advanced healthcare providers is critical. There is.
Healthcare consulting firm Kaufman Hall released its annual Healthcare Performance Report on October 24, based on a survey of 106 hospital and health system leaders across the United States. The results found that 63% of respondents said their organization is struggling to meet healthcare demand. Give patients access to doctors. Meanwhile, nearly half of leaders reported an increase in the amount of outpatient care.
“A lot of that is still due to pent-up demand from the pandemic, especially when it comes to elective procedures like colonoscopies, which many people are putting off,” said Kaufman Hall Managing Director and Business Improvement. practice leader Lance Robinson says. , Said Beckers. “Now they’re going back to the health care delivery model and the volume is increasing,” putting more pressure on doctors.
By now, it is clear that many labor shortages continue, and professionals believe that if organizations want to do a better job of meeting care demand and controlling costs, they must adopt care delivery models. He states that we should think about this in a different way than we have in the past.
“Our recommendation is to look at how clients are using APPs in conjunction with their physicians, as the number of APPs currently on the market far exceeds the number of physicians. ,” Robinson said.
In 2020, approximately 36,000 nurse practitioners joined the healthcare workforce, along with approximately 10,000 physician assistants and 2,600 certified registered nurse anesthetists. Together, they account for more than 60% of providers entering the workforce. Kaufman Hall’s analysis of data from professional societies found that only 37% were physicians. This change is becoming increasingly evident in primary care and hospital settings.
Through interviews and analysis of performance data, the company found that organizations that leverage higher percentages of APPs within their employees increasingly outperform their peers on productivity and compensation metrics.
“A premier academic health system in the Southeast currently employs four APPs per physician in hospitalist and internist services,” the company previously said in a blog post. “Since the labor cost per APP is about one-third (compared to per doctor), this system allows us to place his APP in the intensive care unit, while at the same time the doctor has a system-wide centralized electronic We can oversee clinical delivery from a command center.”
Keck Hospital of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles recently began hiring more nurses, which has improved the efficiency of the nursing department, said Theon Houston Lasik, DNP, RN, the hospital’s chief nursing officer. Told. Beckers.
In addition to supporting doctors’ work, nurse practitioners “work very closely with nurses,” she says. “In some cases, even if nurses don’t want to contact medical staff, they can contact the NP on the ward and get instructions more quickly if needed. Our work has been very successful in adding to the care delivery model.”