By Rebecca Nadeau
The end of the year represents a pivotal time for hospital leaders—a time to prepare for the year ahead and set goals and objectives. As your organization considers how to create a healthier hospital in 2023, a key factor of that decision making should be evaluating how digital health solutions can support your initiatives.
As a marketplace for digital health solutions, we work with hospital leaders to identify their specific digital health needs, and we support them in identifying, procuring, and contracting for the best solutions quickly and easily.
This blog, based on hundreds of discussions with hospital leaders over the past few months, highlights the most common “wish list items” for which they have requested our help, as well as key insights into how digital health solutions can support these needs.
Wish List Item #1: Alleviating Staff Shortages and Burnout
Ask any healthcare leader what their top priority is for the year ahead, and staffing sits at, or is near, the top of the list. In fact, a recent survey of 100 hospital leaders by healthcare consultancy Sage Growth Partners found that 61% identify staff recruitment and retention as their top strategic priority for the next two years.
At Panda, we’re helping our marketplace clients find innovative ways to support their workforce and alleviate staffing challenges through more efficient and, in some cases, automated processes. Numerous examples exist, but a few recent solutions our hospitals have implemented include wellness, digital patient intake, digital virtual assistants, digital wayfinding, and more.
Wish List Item #2: Enhancing Patient Engagement and Loyalty
As competition increases for hospitals, both from other health systems as well as from new and emerging industry disruptors, many of our clients are asking us to help them find digital health solutions that can enhance patient retention and referrals.
Price transparency tools, advanced patient messaging, network utilization management, CRM, digital payments, unified patient messaging, and more, are all useful for improving patient engagement and loyalty. At Panda, we’re helping hospitals determine which of these solutions are most helpful in meeting their unique patient engagement and loyalty needs and challenges.
Wish List Item #3: Improving the Bottom Line
It won’t be a surprise to any hospital leader that a common discussion we’re having with our marketplace clients focuses on financial challenges. From supply chain shortages to staffing costs to inflation—all are contributing to short and long-term revenue and financial pressures.
Many digital health solutions can play a key role in helping support long-term financial health at these organizations. They include tools related to:
- Claims management
- Price estimation/transparency
- Prior authorization
- Digital payments
- VBC/payer contracting
With so many different solutions on the market that can impact the bottom line in a positive way, hospitals need to be extremely careful to select the right solution for their organization. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, so one of our biggest priorities is helping hospitals identify the solutions that will have the most ROI and bottom-line impact for their specific organization.
Wish List Item #4: Meeting Demand for Health at Home Models
Since the pandemic, recognition has grown among both consumers and hospital leaders related to the value of health-at-home models. As a result, it’s not surprising that we’re experiencing a significant uptick in demand among hospitals seeking remote patient monitoring, hospital-at-home, and virtual visit solutions.
Some of these organizations are implementing these solutions for the first time, while others are seeking to replace their current technologies. Regardless of the situation, we’re making both scenarios easier for hospitals to navigate, as the remote patient monitoring, hospital at home, and telehealth solutions included on our marketplace are fully vetted—and truly the best available.
Wish List Item #5: Making Meaningful Health Equity Improvements
At Panda, we’ve been excited to see the significant increase in demand among our marketplace solutions that can help reduce health disparities, as well as solutions that can help them better understand and address social determinants of health (SDOH).
Some of the many digital solutions on our marketplace that are making a difference in this area include:
- Patient engagement solutions that enhance patient outreach to disparate patient populations
- Digital patient intake solutions that build up SDOH-related insights through patient surveys
- Remote patient monitoring, telehealth, and health-at-home tools that improve patient access
- Data analytics solutions that help identify at-risk patients and close health equity gaps
Wish List Item #6: Achieving Seamless EHR Integrations
Hospitals continue to struggle with exchanging clinical and operational data across the continuum. We’re helping hospitals address this challenge through multiple approaches, based on their unique needs and digital maturity.
For example, some of our clients are using our marketplace to find solutions that are specifically focused on enhancing interoperability across the system. For others, we’re helping ensure that any new digital health solution implemented meets that organization’s unique interoperability requirements and unique EHR integration needs.
We’d love to help your organization ensure a healthier year ahead. Contact us to learn more about how we can help your organization find the best solution for your unique needs.
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