In this blog, guest blogger Dr. Jared Pelo, discusses the physician shortage, the contributing causes and the aging population – two competing factors – and offers solutions to improve operational efficiencies to help solve the problem to right the imbalance.
This blog was contributed by Dr. Jared Pelo, co-founder at Bionic Health.
By 2025, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services predicts that there will be a nationwide shortage of nearly 90,000 physicians. Burnout, COVID, retirement and limits on medical school and residency programs are the main reasons for the shortage.
Compounding the problem is an aging population. The number of people aged 65 and older is projected to reach 83.7 million by 2050.
In this climate, you can’t afford to lose physicians and you need to attract new recruits to keep up with demand. It costs healthcare organizations over $2M dollars in annual revenue loss from one physician vacancy and $250K and 6-12 months to recruit a new physician.
Burnout continues to be a main reason contributing to the shortage. Pre-pandemic, 42% of physicians said they were burned out and 64% say it has intensified due to the pandemic. It’s estimated that burnout costs U.S. healthcare organizations $4.6B a year. Some have said that burnout is a pandemic in and of itself. Burdensome administrative tasks, such as time-consuming care documentation is fueling burnout. According to the American Medical Association, for each hour of care provided, another two hours is spent on administrative tasks. What’s more, and much to everyone’s dissatisfaction, natural conversation between patients and providers and human interaction is sacrificed as physician’s try to document care while delivering it to stay on top of it.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. AI, voice-driven solutions are here to help you do more with less to offset these challenges.
The Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX), an ambient clinical intelligence (ACI) solution, automatically documents patient encounters at the point of care accurately and efficiently. For use in office and telehealth settings, in all ambulatory specialties including primary and urgent care, Nuance DAX enhances the quality of care and the patient experience, increases provider efficiency and satisfaction, and improves financial outcomes. Deep-learning-based AI automatically converts encounter conversations into clinical notes tailored to each specialty that adhere to established documentation standards reducing the burden of compliance expertise and enabling appropriate coding.
Boost physician satisfaction
Nuance DAX is in use nationwide and is delivering impressive results. It reduces feelings of burnout by decreasing time spent documenting care and enabling physicians to practice at the top of their license. In a Nuance survey, 93% of providers using DAX said they would be disappointed if they no longer had DAX, 9 out of 10 would recommend it, and 70% said it reduced their feelings of burnout and fatigue.
Increase operational efficiency
With Nuance DAX, documentation is created automatically, efficiently, and consistently. It’s optimized delivering a gold standard in clinical documentation. What’s more, it reduces documentation time by 50%. With that time savings, physicians can choose to add, on average, three to five appointments per day or spend the time on leisure.
In this competitive climate, you need to provide a work environment where physicians enjoy their day to day, have work life balance, and where delivering patient-centered care is truly achieved. Thankfully, Nuance DAX is here to offset the physician shortage to make this possible.