How Can a Digital Workforce Address Healthcare’s Challenges? – #HITsm Chat Topic

We’re excited to share the topic and questions for this week’s #HITsm chat happening Friday, 3/12 at Noon ET (9 AM PT). This week’s chat will be hosted by Linda Stotsky (@EMRAnswers) from @Bossoft on the topic “How Can a Digital Workforce Address Healthcare’s Challenges?

Things have changed drastically for the healthcare sector over the last year. When the #COVID19 pandemic started, healthcare organizations worldwide were presented with a unique set of challenges. Opportunities quickly opened for technology to ease access to care settings, free frontline workers from repetitive tasks, and streamline operations in hospitals and health systems. We quickly accelerated the adoption of digital health services and solutions like telehealth and RPA, because organizations were in need of digital tools that could be deployed quickly and easily, without interruption to the larger IT infrastructure.

Now that we’ve been through the first (and second) phase of the pandemic, and are involved in the vaccine roll-out, we’re again witnessing the need for a more efficient way to balance the health of patient populations with the continuity of healthcare operations. Accompanying the vaccines are multiple rules to follow: the temperatures at which the vaccines must be stored, tracking databases to log who has received the vaccine, what reports are generated, and when the second dosage is required.  It’s difficult to pull from other areas in the health system when people are busy getting the vaccines into arms and caring for the sickest of patients. There are scheduling conflicts, appointment bottlenecks, billing and revenue issues, and supply chain inventories to manage.

A “digital workforce” can sort through multiple databases, comb through records, and create distribution lists for busy health systems. RPA “bots” can be used to monitor vaccine recipients for side effects, detail reporting, speed claims information, report to regulatory agencies, and schedule second dose appointments for patients. This is an important aspect of the digitization of healthcare.  Will the lessons learned fortify us if we are faced with a new pandemic in the future?

Join us for this week’s #HITsm chat where we’ll discuss the potential of a digital workforce, and how it can help us address the future challenges we face in a post-pandemic world.

Topics for this week’s #HITsm Chat:

T1: How has COVID-19 propelled digitization in healthcare? #HITsm

T2: How can a digital workforce ensure business continuity during COVID-19? #HITsm

T3: How can automation tools improve the vaccine roll-out? #HITsm

T4: How do we ensure our workforce is “COVID-proof” for future pandemics? #HITsm

T5: How can a digital workforce create long-term psychological change? #HITsm

BONUS: If you could offload one task to a bot, what would it be and why? #HITsm

Upcoming #HITsm Chat Schedule

3/19 – Information Blocking
Hosted by John Lynn (@techguy)

We look forward to learning from the #HITsm community! As always, let us know if you’d like to host a future #HITsm chat or if you know someone you think we should invite to host.

If you’re searching for the latest #HITsm chat, you can always find the latest #HITsm chat and schedule of chats here.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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