In healthcare, the quality of care you provide is only as good as your care delivery strategy, and how effectively you can carry it out. But even in the best of times, creating and maintaining an effective care strategy isn’t easy. And during a pandemic, it’s a serious challenge to not only ensure quality, but to actively improve patient care.
Yet it’s a goal that can’t be ignored, for a number of reasons. The drive to constantly improve patient care helps organizations better serve people at a time when consumers have more options than ever before (including increasingly available telehealth options). On top of that, improving patient care is a fundamental aspect of value-based care, which has become the standard for CMS reimbursement.
Medicare is the nation’s largest health program with more than 60 million members, providing almost 60 percent of the combined revenue from America’s biggest insurers. Given that scope, the CMS has an enormous influence over healthcare’s financial structure. With that in mind, meeting value-based care incentives should be a key priority not just to improve patient care but to ensure long-term viability.
But how can leaders improve patient care at a time when resources are often strained, and the clinical workforce limited? Every organization will have its own unique path to success. Yet for many, the use of a healthcare managed services program (MSP) can serve as a huge helping hand for this important goal. Here are a couple of ways that MSP can help providers and facilities of all types improve patient care.
How to Improve Patient Care with MSP: Workforce Management
There are a number of ways that MSP can help organizations be more efficient in the way they provide care for both individuals and populations. For starters, a reliable MSP partner can help raise the quality of your workforce management. The efficiency offered by streamlined, automated workforce solutions can help relieve front-line workers from redundant tasks and free them to focus more on patient care.
And by offering access to a pool of nationwide contingency workers, managed services can provide access to the staff you need to give your primary workers more time off. This can help raise the morale among your permanent employees. It can also help you avoid burnout and compassion fatigue — both of which can have seriously negative effects on the quality of care your organization provides.
High employee morale is a key driver of quality care. It makes sense that happier, more engaged employees provide better patient care, but there’s also specific data to support that claim. Hospitals that work to improve employee engagement see a corresponding increase in patient satisfaction, according to research cited by Nell W. Buhlman and Thomas H. Lee at the Harvard Business Review.
“It’s well known that patient experience and workforce engagement are intertwined, but few providers integrate and analyze these data to understand the connection,” Buhlman and Lee write. “Leading organizations are taking it a step further, leveraging the data to understand how improvement on patient experience and/or employee engagement correlates with broader organizational performance.”
How to Improve Patient Care with MSP: Systems & Infrastructure
In addition to workforce management, MSP offers a chance to upgrade and streamline an organization’s vendor management systems (VMS) for better-organized electronic healthcare record (EHR) systems. This can help ensure that workers have faster, easier access to critical patient data — a key component in ensuring fast response times and effective patient care.
Because it helps with important security factors like data encryption, access management and personnel training, updating your technical systems also helps you improve cybersecurity and protect patient data. Keeping personal health information (PHI) safe can boost patient confidence. It also helps you avoid data breaches, which can lead to compromised care, operational disruptions, and even lawsuits.
Upgrading and better managing EHR systems with an MSP partner also helps your organization stay compliant with important regulatory standards like HIPAA and the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005 (PSQIA). Compliance with these regulations isn’t just legally necessary, but designed to ensure patient safety and quality of care, too.
> Did you know? CareerStaff Unlimited has earned The Joint Commission’s Gold Seal of Approval® for Health Care Staffing Services Certification. Here’s how that helps us offer better MSP services.
Finally, the efficiency offered by a reliable, scalable MSP partner can also help you more effectively manage patient populations, another cornerstone of value-based care. MSP can help by identifying and automating populations, then segmenting them by demographics or risk factors. And this can help you implement preventive measures to keep patients healthy and reduce readmissions and ER visits.
Seeking a Healthcare MSP Partner? CareerStaff Can Help
CareerStaff Unlimited is proud to offer a best-in-class managed service program that provides all the benefits listed above, and then some. Our customer-driven account teams will help you customize the solution you need to best serve your patients. You’ll can also get access to subject matter expertise to ensure that you’re making the right workforce decisions to serve your specific populations.
Optimize your healthcare workforce and operations today: Contact CareerStaff or request a consultation for more info about how America’s leading healthcare managed services program (MSP) can help you improve patient care, drive efficiency and meet other important operational goals.