The historic talent shortage facing healthcare organizations won’t get better anytime soon. A combination of demographic shifts and increased pressures on workers post-pandemic are creating a tsunami that is reducing the supply of available healthcare professionals rapidly.
The historic talent shortage facing healthcare organizations won’t get better anytime soon. A combination of demographic shifts and increased pressures on workers post-pandemic are creating a tsunami that is reducing the supply of available healthcare professionals rapidly.
The timing couldn’t be worse, with recent trends showing an increased demand for care. Without radical innovation, the labor shortage will only worsen over the next decade, with devastating impacts on patient access and outcomes.
These market forces offer an opportunity to build technology solutions that enable health systems to leverage their resources as effectively as possible across staff retention, recruitment, onboarding, training and documentation.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, openings in healthcare occupations are expected to grow by 15% from 2019 to 2029, much faster than the average for all occupations. However, current labor trends make it unlikely that there will be a sufficient pool of available talent large enough to fill these roles.
The resulting staffing gaps will cut across nearly all occupations. The Association of American Medical Colleges estimates that the total physician shortage will range from 38,000 to 124,000 professionals by 2034. Similarly, experts predict a shortage of 160,000 registered nurses and licensed practical nurses by 2030.
Trends driving the staffing shortfalls include:
Simultaneously, these trends are driving increased healthcare demand and utilization:
To solve the industry’s labor shortage, we believe innovation must focus on two areas:
1. The healthcare labor pool must be reimagined and expanded. This will require innovation to happen on two fronts:
2. Stakeholders must prioritize staff augmentation and support while optimizing and streamlining workflows. This renewed emphasis on increasing clinical workforce productivity and decision-making is crucial to reduce healthcare providers’ administrative burden, increase time spent at the bedside with patients and invest in the well-being of healthcare professionals.
Redesign Health is committed to developing a broad range of Operating Companies that will help organizations tackle the healthcare shortage and mitigate its impacts on patient care.
To reimagine and expand the healthcare labor pool, we are focusing on:
To drive workforce augmentation and efficiency forward, we are focusing on:
Due to the acuity of the current supply-and-demand imbalance, healthcare stakeholders are already spending a lot of money triaging upstream issues such as employee recruitment and retention, and this will remain a priority for years to come.
That said, we believe the second wave of innovation will see companies addressing downstream issues, such as training and clinical skill development for newly matriculated nurses who are transitioning to bedside care.
Our research suggests that the average level of experience of a 12-hour bedside nurse has fallen from about seven years pre-pandemic to three years today, raising the risk for medication errors and other adverse events. What’s more, a shortage of nurse preceptors means fewer staff are available to train these newer nurses. Therefore, great opportunity exists in building solutions that can help nurses with two to three years of experience close the knowledge gap efficiently and effectively.
We have built two exciting stealth Operating Companies that we believe will help providers, payers and ultimately patients by reimagining the healthcare talent pool and optimizing workforce efficiency.
StealthCo1 is an enablement platform for provider organizations that improves clinician workforce visibility, addresses turnover risk proactively, and mitigates the costs and disruption of turnover for revenue-generating professionals. This will help provider organizations prevent and manage clinician turnover, a problem that can cost $200,000 to $3 million per clinician. It will also help reduce internal and external stressors that are causing high rates of burnout and depression among clinicians.
StealthCo2 is a utilization management (UM) workflow automation solution designed to expedite and enhance the quality of UM determinations for health plans. While several existing solutions target efficiency at the point of a UM request submission, a sizable portion of reviews still require manual intervention. This solution is poised to transform the space by centralizing and synthesizing disparate data sources to improve the speed, quality and overall efficiency of clinical determinations.
These two stealth companies join an existing ecosystem of successful Operating Companies developed by Redesign Health to address critical staffing shortages. These companies run the gamut of staffing, practice outsourcing, staff augmentation and decision support:
Sticking to the status quo will not get health systems out of the staffing crisis. It’s time for radical innovation. We see tremendous possibilities for investing in solutions that expand the healthcare labor pool and drive workforce efficiencies—allowing health systems to maintain the proper staffing levels that are imperative for high-quality care.
.webp)