Healthcare Staff are Digital Workers Now: They Need a Better Experience

It’s 3 a.m. at a busy hospital. An acute care patient has been admitted. The patient does have an electronic health record (EHR) on file but when a nurse tries to access the file to check for drug allergies and other details, the file cannot be opened. The nurse alerts IT staff that the system is down, and she needs the information ‘stat.’ This disconnect between patient and staff need and system performance is just one example of why physicians, nurses and other medical staff rely on a system to be up and running 24/7. It is why the concept of a smooth digital employee experience (DEX) is becoming a bigger part of how IT teams deliver system performance in a hospital setting. 

Thinking of healthcare clinicians and staff as digital workers highlights the importance of addressing system performance issues that affect patient outcomes, their ability to provide care, and job satisfaction, especially in a 24/7 environment like hospitals and other healthcare facilities. Healthcare workers are already navigating issues with lack of interoperability between systems, staff and providers, and concerns about patient data privacy and security. IT teams and healthcare systems can alleviate some anxiety by giving workers the best performing digital user experience, including physicians and other staff that share responsibility for patient care.

Remedies for a better digital experience to optimize patient care

Giving clinicians and staff a more smoothly running digital experience is doable. Here are five elements to look at:

1. System monitoring – The ideal scenario is to monitor all aspects of the digital experience to prevent issues before they disrupt a healthcare worker’s day. A common occurrence is medical staff experiencing unnecessary delays in a desktop logon. Physicians, for example, move between multiple locations and devices during their shift and don’t have time to wait 40 seconds to access an application. By having a holistic view of the system – from keyboard mouse to the device they’re using to how they’re connecting to backend systems – IT staff can isolate the issue, and using a DEX solution, automatically remediate it, preventing disruption and saving valuable time for physicians and staff.
2. Predictive analysis – Data is the fuel that runs system monitoring. Collecting true real-time data, as fast as every few seconds across the system, enables IT to pinpoint issues like poor WI-FI connectivity or slow logons down to the user level, and preemptively fix the issues. Analyzing current data also distinguishes between ‘normal’ spikes or performance changes and events which require remediation. It knows when high CPU usage is the result of a worker loading a large data file versus a prolonged spike that could be a system wide network issue.
3. IT response – The hospital shift that strikes fear in IT’s heart is the on-call overnight help desk shift. Inevitably medical staff would flag an issue, and IT would have to call a more senior IT staff in the middle of the night to resolve the problem. That left medical staff decidedly unsatisfied. However, with predictive data analysis and prepared ‘level 3 actions’ ready to be executed by level 1, the help desk on-call person can have the advantage of up-to-date information and be able to give the 3 a.m. staff caller a much shorter time-to-resolution or ideally, report the issue is already over. Elevating on-call IT’s ability to resolve performance issues is essential in a critical, 24/7 healthcare environment. It also lessens stress for medical staff who can’t afford wasteful downtime.
4. Security – Healthcare staff must contend with patient data privacy compliance regulations and the constant threat of cyber-attacks every day on the job. The two pillars of concern can lead to ‘security controls friction’ in which the need for a satisfying digital experience and the need for tight controls against threats can be in conflict. To arrive at a happy workable medium security measures must operate in the background, without impacting on the user experience. It is another reason constant system monitoring, threat detection and automated remediation has to be part of a DEX system. Using data collection and predictive analysis, in the background, IT teams can evaluate whether a hospital’s devices and applications in use, or its networking systems, are vulnerable. The monitoring can flag outdated security patches, and whether antivirus and anti-malware software is up to date and fully protecting against threats. Using data intelligence, a DEX system can initiate remediation, preventing a breach before it reaches a healthcare worker’s desktop.
5. Access controls – Policy and access controls is an element where security friction between medical staff and digital workers often surfaces. If a physician can’t quickly log in when seeing a patient, they may resort to notes on paper which impacts patient care. To minimize this friction, access controls need to be up to date as new physicians join a hospital or nursing staff change roles and responsibilities. Controls also must synchronize with onboarding and offboarding activities, to prevent a security breach.  

Give healthcare workers a better digital experience

By getting ahead of performance issues with system monitoring and predictive analysis, IT teams can deliver a digital workspace environment that benefits all. Medical staff can avoid wasting time with logon delays and system downtime. IT staff now have the power of current data to fix issues before they reach a desktop. And those 3 a.m. trouble calls can become a relic of the past.

Photo: Filograph, Getty Images

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