The Hospital Review did an interesting article where they asked the heads of 65 hospitals in the US how they think the field will change in the next few years
Reading it though.... Goodness if I have to read the words "AI will reduce administrative burden, mitigate staffing challenges, and streamline diagnosing" again im gonna scream. It's like every third CEO lmao omg it's terrifying, so transparently just snake oil "it'll solve all your problems with a press of the button" shit and they've fallen for it. these are the people in charge of our healthcare systems
Virtual nursing programs will be an innovative way to address workforce and nurse staffing needs, allowing a virtual nurse to care for patients and support the bedside team through a bi-directional audio/video platform.
oh god, this dinglefuck is planning "what if we staffed a whole hospital with nothing but $15/hr CNAs and med techs? 🤑🤑🤑" as their grand plan. don't worry, there's a 🤖virtual nurse🤖 who is shared between about 300 patients and can't do one goddamn thing for you except answer call bells with "the CNA will get there as soon as they're able, I've paged them again"
Okay, I read the whole article and my main impression is that they have no goddamn idea what to do about staffing shortages so they're just hoping that someone invents magic soon.
The only real solution is "pay nurses more and pay for more nurses," but I'm afraid they might be telling the truth that there really isn't the cash. (Though one source of low-hanging fruit is to replace travel nurses with cheaper and more efficient local ones, through an advanced technology known as "not treating your local nurses like shit." Lotta places paying $100/hr for travelers because that comes out of a different budget than giving your regular nurses a raise from $30 to $40.)
...Also, they need to fix their computer charting systems, not by adding AI NFT crypto virtual telehealth I want this on a shirt, but by, like, making them not suck. Every EMR I have ever worked with has been a huge time and effort waster not because it needed advanced technology, but because it did shit like "refuse to advance until you specify whether the patient's foot pain is in their left ear or right ear" or "conceal frequently used features behind literally invisible buttons that are placed right next to the trap button that crashes the whole computer if you click it." (Every EMR I have ever used has had at least one trap button. Every one.)
So those are two things that would help, but I'm under no illusion they'd be enough. There's still not a lot of nurses compared to the number of people who need healthcare, and an ominous number of us are over 50 and/or have some combination of repetitive stress injuries, PTSD, and long COVID. The grim answer is that nobody really knows how we're going to fix this.
this is such an apt and well put take
honestly from all the conversations I've seen this past year what I think is happening is that just,,, hospitals don't work? the economics of it just doesn't play out anymore, and they're making less and less sense every day. I've been seeing (at least in our region) a wave of hospitals going under, being bought up by larger systems, which go under because hey something doesn't stop being a money pit just because it got purchased. hospitals have long run on a model of "outpatient looses money but links people to the inpatient side where money is made", but increasing costs of everything and the inability to increase the money coming in is making that margin smaller and smaller.
this article is such an articulation of the fact that next to nobody knows what to do about that. the people in there talking about shit like "your PCP is going to be in a CVS soon, its bleak but it will at least work" are the only people who seem to at least understand the enormity of the issue. but most everyone else leading the industry has instead just bought into the idea that magic is just around the corner
