The top two goals for any care facility regardless of size are to remain profitable and still uphold or improve the quality of the care process. For many, it’s a tough high-wire act as, conventionally, one often comes at the expense of the other making it seem like a situation where you cannot have your cake and eat it. However, it doesn’t have to be that way. By tapping into the right healthcare technology, health facilities can still lower operational expenses and bolster patient care. To show you how, we’ll deep dive into our virtual care and remote patient monitoring solutions to illustrate how they afford the best of both worlds for providers.
1. Virtual care can lower physician travel expenses
Physicians often have to check up with their patients. The frequency of these visits can be particularly higher for chronically ill patients that require regular attention outside of the care facility.
For patients who cannot come into the doctor’s office due to mobility issues, or the severity of their condition, this means physicians are the ones doing all the visitation. With regular travel comes increased operational costs for a facility in the following ways:
- Out-of-work station allowances
- Reimbursed travel expenses
- Driver allowances in case the facility provides transportation
While Aura’s virtual care can’t completely eliminate doctor-patient visits, it can certainly greatly reduce the number of trips. As a result, this means a reprieve for your operational budget due to a lowering or elimination of the above costs and other auxiliary expenses.
2. Technology improves health outcomes
Every care facility strives to ensure the right health outcomes for their facility. It’s the primary objective of every healthcare provider, and it speaks to a facility’s ability to provide quality care.
With our RPM technology, health outcomes improve due to a variety of capabilities. For example, our technology leverages artificial intelligence and trend visualization to help physicians understand patient data better and faster. This not only improves the accuracy of diagnosis but also reduces turnaround time for clinical decisions. Moreover, it eliminates human errors that can hamper the efficacy of treatment.
What’s more, for patients in critical care our technology enhances collaboration between care teams due to the ease of accessibility of shared data, as well as our convenient communication features. This allows the decentralization of care coordination which also goes a step further to ensure the desired health outcomes.
3. RPM technology can reduce overhead expenses for patient data management
When it comes to patient data management, most care facilities operate on systems that can only be described as far from ideal. The majority rely on legacy systems which cut off connectivity of data that throws into disarray care coordination. In terms of overhead costs, unstructured data and data silos have the following financial repercussions:
- Inflating storage costs, with statistics indicating that businesses spend approximately $3,351 annually per TB
- Increasing administrative work for clinical staff at the expense of productivity
- Increasing the need to hire specialists to manage and protect patient data
Remote patient monitoring technology can cushion some of the expenses when it comes to managing patient data. Providing a unified solution that improves data visibility typically via the cloud, RPM can reduce data storage needs by helping to eliminate duplicate and redundant data.
Moreover, it automates iterative chores inpatient data collecting and monitoring, which means clinical staff can divert their resources to important care processes.
4. Technology reduces the risk of new infections for patients
We’re living in the coronavirus era, which has forced humanity to rethink its approach to the care process as we know it. Patients with chronic illnesses are particularly vulnerable to COVID, but it’s not just this virus that threatens their safety.
There are many more infections that lurk in waiting rooms. The more time patients spend there, the higher the risk of contracting HAI or healthcare-associated infections such as SSIs, sepsis, CDIs, and others. And with chronic care patients who need to check in with their physicians regularly, the risk of HAIs is even higher.
However, with the right technology, hospitals and clinics can reduce the need for patients to have to physically come in for an appointment. Our virtual care technology, for instance, allows physicians to tend to patients remotely. This means patients spend less time in waiting rooms and instead channel more energy toward recovery.
5. Healthcare technology lower clinical staff turnover
In 2022, hospital staff turnover is up by 6.4%, bringing it to a total of 25.9% for the year. Clinical staff turnover is down to many causes, but a few of the most common ones include burnout resulting from staff being overworked. This can increase a facility’s operational expenses as they have to start expensive hiring processes, with the average business spending approximately $4,000 on every rehire.
Technology can help lower the regularities of rehiring, by reducing workflow burdens on hospital staff in the following ways:
- Reduce in-person appointments and traveling
- Automated compliance and payment processes
- Automated patient data capture and monitoring
By eliminating certain administrative tasks, employee satisfaction and engagement improves. Staff turnover declines and so too do HR operational expenses.
6. Improved patient care due to timely intervention during emergencies
Clinical staff can miss out-of-range vitals. A busy workflow or human error may be to blame but, regardless, Aura’s healthcare technology can bring this to the attention of intensivists. As a result, physicians can spot early warning signs and thus execute medical intervention before the situation takes a turn for the worst.
Our technology enables this by way of notifications or reminders. Physicians can set parament thresholds and once vitals deviate beyond these ranges, a clinical worker receives a notification so they can tend to the patient before an adverse event kicks in.
Conclusions
There’s much to gain for facilities in terms of care process improvement and operational cost saving, as we’ve discussed today. It’s therefore important that healthcare providers incorporate technology into their workflows if they are to improve their profitability and patient care as well. Leverage Aura’s telehealth solution and remote patient monitoring solutions to control your overhead, and cater to the needs of your patient. If you’d like to schedule a demonstration to see our technology in action, contact us today.
is Aura’s proprietary digital healthcare platform
