Digitalization in Healthcare: Why Data Is a Hospital’s Secret Weapon for Staff Satisfaction and Productivity

Hiring and retention have become top priorities for nearly every industry, but healthcare is its own beast. Healthcare facilities are now facing a drastic labor shortage, and in critical environments like the ICU, every employee can be the difference between life or death—not only physicians but also administrative staff, IT professionals and building managers.

What’s more, a recent study found that almost half (47%) of US clinicians plan to leave their current role within the next two to three years. Those same participants shared that they feel “overloaded with data and stuck with burdensome, inefficient administrative systems.”

Data Aggregation to the Rescue

Hospitals are primarily centers for human health and wellbeing, but many forget that they are also bustling data hubs. Any given hospital generates an estimated 50 petabytes of data each year, capturing insights on patients as well as clinical staff, room conditions and facility performance. However, many healthcare leaders struggle to take advantage of that data access as they face siloed, disconnected datasets. In fact, only 3-5% of that data is actually leveraged.

Advances in healthcare data management enable real-time decision support, helping leaders make staffing decisions and adjustments to boost staff performance. With greater data insights on all aspects of the hospital, from patient care to the building environment to compliance reporting, staff are freed up from burdensome administrative systems and data processes to perform more efficiently and productively. As a result, staff have more time and knowledge to dedicate to patient care activities.

Who Stands to Benefit?

Effective data management, aggregation and automation creates a powerful healthcare facility, unlocking efficiencies at every level. Let’s take a closer look at how digitalization impacts key roles within the hospital ecosystem.

Business Leaders

When data from across the hospital is brought together and analyzed, healthcare business leaders can make data-driven decisions to improve workflow, productivity and patient and employee environments by leaps and bounds. Data management and aggregation allow leaders to minimize downtime, which can cost up to $62/minute per operating room, identify new revenue and cost saving opportunities, lower readmission rates and enable higher Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement.

With healthcare becoming increasingly competitive, hospital leaders that make investments in smart facilities, data-driven innovation and a more productive workforce will stand out.

Clinicians

With data normalized and aggregated from sources like EHR systems, patient monitors, blood tests, CT or MRI scans and doctors’ notes, physicians can make more informed decisions regarding patient care. With more efficient and interoperable systems, clinicians can also spend less of their workday on reporting, data input and other administrative tasks; instead, they can focus on care, patient communication, training and research.

Patients

Smart care environments have a direct impact on patient experiences. Patient information overlayed with building environment data can be safely and respectfully leveraged to create more personalized patient rooms, boosting patient morale and health outcomes. Data intelligence can enable real-time, secure, actionable insights that help facilities and staff respond to occupant needs and improve patient experiences.

When facilities managers have better data insights, patients also benefit from a safer environment with critical environmental factors like indoor air quality, fire prevention, threat detection and energy efficiency.

Building Managers

With greater data insights, facilities leaders can create a smart, healthy building that puts occupant health first while generating savings, boosting sustainability and creating greater efficiency overall. With good, complete datasets fed into a building automation system, hospital building managers and their teams can make the most of their time and resources and limit administrative burden, in turn creating more productive working environments for all staff.

Administrative Staff

Administrative staff arguably stand to benefit the most from data management, normalization and interoperability.

Take compliance, for example. Compliance reporting has become increasingly important following the COVID-19 pandemic and its resulting increase in healthcare building inspections. A task often completed manually, with employees compiling performance and environmental data from all corners of the hospital, is now able to be managed and organized from a single pane of glass. Not only does this ensure inspections are passed, but it also limits downtime and supports hospital revenue. In turn, this allows administrative employees to focus their talents on other critical elements of hospital operations.

With intuitive, user-friendly technology that automates routine tasks, clinicians and staff can make the most of their time and resources and gain greater flexibility, satisfaction and efficiency in their role. The result? A healthy, productive and safe environment for patients, clinicians and all healthcare staff.