Scott Newton, DNP, RN, MHA, EMT-P, Vice President of Care Model Solutions at TeleTracking—and a patient flow expert with more than 25 years of clinical experience—shared his thoughts on this topic during a webinar on April 18. The following is a recap, along with questions that were submitted from audience members.
Today’s caregivers—and consequently patients—face challenges that can result in long waits for care. For example:
To address these types of issues, it’s critical to have sufficient people, processes and tools interacting and providing consistent, reliable and sustainable outcomes. And that’s also why value based care is essential—since it leads to better individual care, better population health, and lower costs.
Regarding the people piece, we know we are facing a decreasing healthcare workforce. By 2025 we are looking at a nursing shortage as large as anything we’ve experienced in the United States. In addition, the demand for physicians will exceed supply by a range of 61,700 to 94,700 patients. At the same time, this reduced number of physicians will be looking at treating an increased number of patients—according to the United Nations, the world’s population is expected to increase by one billion people by 2025 and of that billion, 300 million will be people aged 65 or older.
With this increasing demand, we need to be judicious with the two resources clinicians have to contribute— time and energy. There needs to be a way to effectively and efficiently balance their cognitive workload—clinical practice, assessment and re-evaluation of patients, and therapeutic communication, with their operational task load—regulatory tasks, equipment sourcing and literally walking miles each day across units. Keep in mind, it’s gotten to the point where physicians spend just 27% of their workday with patients.
So how do we give time back to caregivers and let them fulfill their mission?
When we do those things, the positive impact is remarkable:
Thank you to everyone who submitted questions after the webinar. We’re happy to answer them here.
How does Value-based Work improve the care environment?
We are all challenged with “doing more, with less”, how do we balance workloads best for our clinicians?
Tell us more about the impact of clinician time and energy stewardship.
Dr. Scott Newton has more than 30 years of experience in healthcare—working as an EMT, a nurse, an educator and a patient flow command center leader—he is also a trusted adviser and thought leader.
Scott has deep knowledge of the healthcare system and understands that success is tied to high reliability, just-in-time responses, and responsible solutions—that it’s about getting it right the first time for patients and clinicians.
A graduate of the Doctor of Nursing Practice program at Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, Scott built a Command Center as an output of his doctoral project and believes that as healthcare continues to evolve, patient flow will play an even more prominent role across the care continuum.
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