Healthcare

Current Issues Facing The Industry 

The healthcare industry is constantly looking to innovate, increasing robustness and capacities as new technological offerings enter the market. However, it’s also a point of necessity to innovate, as the issues that face healthcare operations must be resolved for work to continue as usual.  

Current Issues Facing The Healthcare Industry Include… 

• Loss of customers due to a lack of touchpoints with previous and current customers. Healthcare providers who don’t build long-term client relationships face a high turnover in customers, decreased profitability and the inability to take long-term health journeys with their customer bases. 

• The potential for data breaches across patient records. Safekeeping of patient data is a part of the duty of care offered within a healthcare environment, so ensuring a strong data policy and safeguarding the privacy of client records is a crucial consideration across the industry. 

• Compliance with health regulations. When operations are disrupted due to manual errors, poor data management, inefficient systems or other technological issues, the ability for health care providers to ensure industry compliance suffers. 

• Limited abilities to upsell across other health services offered. When healthcare providers are siloed in their activity, each department suffers as a result of missed opportunities. 

• Limited measurements on doctor KPIs. Outdated systems lead to flaws in reporting and can contribute to a culture where the performance of doctors and key healthcare providers aren’t monitored. 

• A lack of targeted professional development for staff, lost in the bustle of daily operational requirements.  

Impacts to The Industry If Issues are Unresolved 

Given the stakes of the work that’s undertaken in the wider healthcare space, finding resolutions for these issues is of paramount importance. If these issues go unresolved, ramifications can include… 

• Increased costs – when systems aren’t updated and optimised for daily workflows, the burden on staff increases, leading to additional overheads and wasted resources. 

• Potential for penalties as a result of Notifiable Data Breaches – if key, private information isn’t kept confidential, healthcare providers face the risk of penalties as a result of data breaches, which can cause impact not only on a financial level, but also on a reputation level.  

• High training costs – without the ability to share centralised information, ideas, tools and experiences within the service, incoming staff require more hands-on training, leading to an increase of costs and overhead. 

• Decrease of revenue – lost opportunities to engage with customers for repeat visits, the inability to convert an incoming lead into a paying client and the high turnover of incoming clients can all lead to dramatic decreases in healthcare revenues. 

• Decrease in service quality – when there’s a lack of clarity across workflows and no transparency in team KPIs, quality across the board can suffer, leading to a drop-off in customer satisfaction and retention.