It’s no secret that care continuity leads to better outcomes, patient satisfaction, and even a care provider’s financial performance. Yet at a time when margins are tight and nurses and clinicians in short supply, maintaining continuity of care can be a challenge. Here’s a look at the main challenges to continuity of care today, along with a few suggestions on how to overcome them.
Why Does Care Continuity Matter?
The importance of care continuity has long been understood, with studies consistently underlining its positive effects. The process of smoothly and seamlessly transitioning a patient through the continuum of care, continuity has long been a cornerstone of effective healthcare delivery in the United States and around the world.
For instance, researchers have connected care continuity with fewer preventable admissions and lower patient mortality rates. Continuity has also been shown to promote engagement, which can lead to not just better outcomes but higher levels of satisfaction among patients, residents, and their loved ones.
What’s more, by promoting improved outcomes and patient satisfaction, continuity of care benefits not just patients but providers, too. It can help make overall care delivery more cost effective and more apt to drive revenue under the value-based care model. As an added bonus, facilities with high satisfaction rates have not only more opportunities for reimbursement but also better visibility to patients under CMS search algorithms.
4 Challenges and Solutions to Care Continuity
Yet despite these well-known benefits, many hospitals, nursing facilities, and other providers struggle to achieve complete continuity of care. Moreover, it’s true that the challenges to achieving care continuity are both numerous and urgent. At the same time, though, leaders of these facilities have an increasingly robust toolbox of options to overcome them.
Challenge #1: Scheduling Issues
One of the biggest and most obvious obstacles to continuity of care includes scheduling issues. If there aren’t enough available workers during a given shift — if a facility is unable to fill its hours per patient day or maintain a full schedule — then patients can no longer reliably transition from one area to another.
> Solution: Especially for hospitals, access to a reliable float pool is a must for ensuring smooth scheduling. Float pools models help ensure backup when needed, and can be used to ease the workload of core staff.
Challenge #2: Staff Shortages
Difficulty scheduling can stem directly from the ongoing shortage of nurses and other clinical professionals. Especially given the shortage in many rural and remote areas, some facilities may simply not be able to staff enough professionals in the specialties they need to fulfill their most basic care obligations, not to mention the more complex functionalities demanded by proper continuity of care.
> Solution: By providing access to a nationwide network of skilled healthcare professionals, a dedicated staffing provider can help provide employers overcome staff shortages. Even better, a healthcare managed service provider (MSP) can help organizations balance the cost of those workers by improving labor management in other ways — learn more here.
Challenge #3: Communication Issues
Communication is critical in the process of transitioning from one unit or department to another, or even from shift to shift. Yet as care becomes ever more siloed, and workloads increase, that communication can suffer. In addition, employers must carefully manage contingency workers to ensure basic communication.
> Solution: Employers can work to improve communication by trying different models of care delivery, particularly the team nursing model. Additionally, they should make sure that their source for contingency workers can guarantee full credentialing and collaborative onboarding to ensure continuity at every point.
Challenge #4: Burnout & Stress
Whether from overwork, dealing with traumatic incidents, or the need for more time off, burnout is high in healthcare. As mentioned by ShiftMed, burnout is large obstacle towards care continuity, often connected with stress or larger mental health conditions like depression, anxiety, and PTSD. Consequently, a burned-out workforce is more prone to errors and poor decision-making. Burnout also contributes to turnover and absenteeism, which can negatively impact care continuity.
> Solution: Employers can offset burnout by offering a more positive culture — for instance, one that emphasizes self-care and provides counseling services. They can go even further by also implementing flexible staffing models to cover unplanned staff absences or personal time off.
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