US Healthcare market can use some tech(2 min read)

I’ve been learning about the US Healthcare market lately from a few friends & mentors. Its such a massive market and one that has immense opportunities to take advantage of tech.

What complicates building a solution, any solution for Healthcare is the need to be careful with privacy. There are hard requirements on how to respect the privacy of the patients involved. Now I am no HIPAA expert but based on what I know so far, this is what makes problem solving in Healthcare very complicated.

We’ve been discusssing staffing in particular and seems like as a country we’re short around 50K physicians and 3.5M nurses. Rural America is most severely hit by this staffing shortage. Most qualified HCPs (Healthcare professionals) prefer living in the big cities. And the ones that are open to working in the small towns & cities don’t have a clear way of finding where the opportunities are.

Since COVID, the staffing situation has exacerbated. We already had fewer HCPs and a large geriatric population. Nursing was already short staffed. Since COVID, more HCPs have decided to quit or retire due to either burnout, to avoid the risk of contracting COVID or simply because they feel they can make more money and travel and control their schedule while working as a temporary staff.

As a result, temporary staffing is on the rise. There are projections stating that in the next 10 years or so a higher percent of the staff at most hospitals is going to be temporary staff.

So that opens up another set of challenges –

• we will not be able to find enough permanent workers,
• will need to depend much more on temporary staff,
• due to shortage in staff and growing pool of patients needing acute – the demands will spike more often, more severely and at shorter notices.

These demands will need to be met with supply faster. Much faster than we’ve done so far.

Traditional methods of contract hiring have worked this way –

1. Hospitals or Health care institutions or Hospitalist groups identify a staffing need.
2. They open up a requisition (a job posting so to speak)
3. They have existing contracts with staffing agencies or in house staffing groups that start to find candidates. This is a manual process where you reach out to HCPs, identify their needs, credential matches and pay rates and try to make a match.
4. The process is people intensive, can be slow.
5. Credentialing is cumbersome and has to be repeatedly done. HCPs hate filling out their credentials everytime a staffing company calls them and has them certify their creds.

Things will need to change very soon – else we’re going to hit a wall soon. Technology can help solve these problems…need to figure out how