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What is causing the staffing issues?
Early retirements and burnout. Because there’s so much demand and early retirements, it’s creating a tighter market, which requires paying more for temporary positions. That draws more people away from full-time positions, because temporary positions are financially attractive—which then exacerbates the problem.
What is the solution?
Some of this is just catching up. We’re working through a large backlog of care needs. There are people who didn’t get their surgeries or didn’t have their colonoscopy. I think some medical employees will return to the workforce. A lot will miss it and will come back.
How do you attract new people to the field and get others to return?
The ability to work flexibly is a real way out of this—saying, “Hey, you can go be a traveling nurse and work 10 months out of the year.” In terms of bringing more people into the profession, one of the silver linings of this pandemic is it really demonstrated how meaningful healthcare work is. It’s drawn so many more nursing and medical school applicants. But we have to have other solutions, most of which I think will be technology-derived.
What kinds of jobs can technology replace?
Actually, that’s not the way to think about it. The way to think about it is, there are some things that can be done by technology that don’t need to be done by a person. Let’s let technology do all those things and let people do that which only people can do. There’s a way to enable somebody to do more with the time that they have—see more patients, administer more care. Telemedicine is a perfect example.
So we’re not talking robots at the bedside?
Well, not exactly, but I do believe that a lot of care can be very well rendered by smart systems. Will there be a robot at the bedside? No. But can a lot of the routine things in healthcare be automated? Absolutely. Think birth control pill refills. There are very clear clinical pathways that can be automated, and they should be, because we can’t have our highly trained clinicians doing that work at the expense of other work that only they can do.
This story first appeared in our sister publication, Crain’s New York Business.