Celebrating Nurses, Fighting Burnout
With National Nurses Week upon us, the team at Memora Health reflected on the indispensable work our nation’s nurses put into every day they work at hospitals, clinics, and community health centers across the country.
Although the training is long, difficult, and often thankless, nurse-practitioners, RNs, and other clinical health care staff have increasingly shifted from their bedside roles to desk jobs. Trained clinicians spend entire mornings sitting behind a desktop computer calling patient after patient to confirm and reschedule appointments for the next day, following up with patients with chronic disease to make sure they’ve taken their medications properly, tracking patient-reported outcomes to check off boxes for Meaningful Use requirements, and confirming that patients who need labs done or physical therapy went to the correct provider of those services accordingly. A 2019 report by McKinsey & Company found that approximately 36% of an RN’s time is spent doing work that could be performed by non-RN team members, thus freeing up nursing time for direct patient care.
The larger administrative burden placed on nurses and other medical professionals is correlated to a rising incidence of burnout. Health care workers, who spend anywhere from four to fifteen years training for a career primarily to treat patients, hardly have the desire — or the energy — to spend the bulk of their time typing behind a screen.
This has led to a huge health care problem — nursing burnout and turnover. Thirty-six percent of nurses report dissatisfaction with their work and 52% are concerned with where their profession is headed. Most notably, 67% of nurses say they waste time completing tasks that other hospital staff could perform. The turnover rate for nurses was 17.2 percent in 2015, largely due to increased workloads and poor meaning derived from work. It’s no surprise that those who dedicate their lives in service to patients feel exhausted sitting behind a desk. In economic terms, the average cost of turnover for a single nurse alone can range from $37,700 to $58,400 for a clinic.
Clinicians — nurses, medical assistants, physicians — are most valuable when practicing at the top of their license, doing what they underwent years of training to do: caring for patients.
As costing models move from the halls of business schools into the boardrooms of health care executives, health systems will realize that it’s well worth doing whatever it takes to give clinicians extra time with patients.
Building for Burnout
While technology, particularly electronic medical records and documentation, have largely been blamed for contributing to the burnout crisis in medicine, there is also opportunity for technology to help ease the burden that today’s medical system places on nurses and other clinicians.
We hear a lot of debate, often controversial, about artificial intelligence replacing radiologists, automating diagnoses based on prior health records, and chatbots that supposedly triage better than emergency rooms, but what if we instead imagined software and artificial intelligence as a tool to automate non-clinical operations — the parts of medicine that, while necessary, were never what clinicians were supposed to do.
In fact, the immediate value of ‘artificial intelligence’ in health care isn’t in improving diagnostics and clinical decision support, but rather in optimizing the same non-clinical workflow that contributes to burnout. It’s no coincidence that this area of the health care industry has had the fastest rate of job growth over past two decades, and entrepreneurs hoping to help untangle dysfunction in the U.S. health care system have taken notice.
This is why our team at Memora Health is excited to be automating tedious, repetitive operations tasks that nursing and front desk staff shouldn’t be doing manually. Just as computation has made other industries more productive, computers in health care should be workhorses, not bottlenecks.
By automating routine follow-up into a simple SMS interface accessible to patients from all walks of life, including:
- scheduling appointments, labs, and imaging
- prescription management, including medication reminders, refills, and medication information
- inbound patient queries, including questions about post-discharge management, appointments, medications, and diet and exercise
- pre- and post-operative management, including preparing patients for surgery and walking them through the post-op pain management and physical therapy process
- and basic health coaching, including care programs for chronic disease, pregnancy, postpartum care, oncology, and general wellness,
we aim to give nurses the freedom and satisfaction to practice what they were trained to do–take care of patients–and give health systems the power to scale their best follow-up and communication practices to every single patient that needs them.
Nurses go above and beyond for their patients and fellow health care workers day after day, and we are both grateful and humbled by their service and dedication. At Memora, we wish all nurses across the country a happy, well-deserved National Nurses Week.
Memora Health is building the operating system for care delivery that implements intelligent, streamlined workflows and revolutionizes the patient experience outside the care setting. We offer a smart end-to-end platform that unifies fragmented health care data to enable providers, payors, and life science companies to automate care delivery operations — from patient communication to documentation to reimbursement. We uniquely use artificial intelligence to digitize existing care delivery workflows, giving clinicians infrastructure that learns from every encounter they have. Memora supports a full suite of virtual care systems from automated patient intake and scheduling to remote monitoring and care pathways to billing and documentation. Memora is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Kevin Durant, Martin Ventures, and several healthcare strategic groups.
Reach out at info@memorahealth.com, we’d love to work together.
