The medical world and healthcare industry are only growing more tumultuous. With intense demands on professionals to both meet patient needs and administrator responsibilities, maintaining a functional practice proves challenging.
Therefore, it’s common for professionals to rely on tools and resources to aid their caretaking abilities. Dictation software, namely Dragon Medical One, is one such invaluable asset. If you haven’t considered it yet, here are eight reasons why you should.
The mounting challenges of medical care
The problems and difficulties any healthcare practice faces are indeed many. From administrative demands and patient complications, any advantage is useful.
Reason 1: Physician Burnout
We’ve talked at length about physician burnout and how it impacts workers and patient care. Medical professionals, clinicians, and doctors deal with not only patient needs but administrative ones too. Paperwork and record-keeping saps hours upon hours, and it’s not uncommon for professionals to work full weeks with minimal breaks. This creates severe burnout, leading to a host of problems, deteriorating performance, increased errors, and worse patient care.
Reason 2: Staff Shortages
Unsurprisingly, the problems listed thus far create worker shortages in the industry. Those who feel underpaid, overstressed, and overworked look for careers elsewhere or retire from medicine. Unfortunately, this only exacerbates other problems in healthcare. Without necessary staff, patients receive less care, emergencies are increasingly difficult to respond to, and appointments are harder to maintain.
Reason 3: Less Technological Advancement
Despite the importance of medical needs and the growing use of technology toolsets, healthcare practices fall behind. Whether it is legacy infrastructure or older hardware, the difficulty associated with introducing new technology proves to be a major hurdle for the healthcare industry. Usually, that’s because new tech requires things like safety procedures, training, and modifying existing infrastructure.
Because of that, healthcare practices are more susceptible to serious failures, cybersecurity intrusions, and difficulties managing patient data. It also runs the risk of violating HIPAA regulations.
Reason 4: Organization and Administrative Confusion
Administrative demands have steadily increased over the years in the healthcare industry, as we mentioned, but this can also create confusion in each layer of care. Said confusion leads to delays, additional complications, and problems when assisting patients. Healthcare workers in the US are responsible for great deals of paperwork, hampering an already overburdened system.
Reason 5: High Turnover Problems
Burnout, stress, and depression don’t just force people out of the healthcare industry, they create short-term problems, too. Turnover is an issue in the medical field because practitioners working long shifts with lower pay and high stress won’t stick around for very long.
This revolving door of nurses, physicians, and doctors can greatly impact care too, as it creates a level of unfamiliarity for the patient, and, it means medical networks are likelier to lack needed staff.
Reason 6: Growing Loan Debt
Medical expenses are just that: expensive, but more so is the inherited debt from medical schooling. No one wants to enter a field that will yield them exhausting, stressful hours and potentially low pay. Therefore, the idea of hauling around heavy school debt is a major deterrent for would-be professionals. Nurses, for example, typically leave medical school with debt over $40,000.
Reason 7: Less Patient and Doctor Time
All the issues we’ve thus far discussed trickle down into the meat of healthcare: the actual time between doctor and patient has been radically reduced. The average discussion between patient and professional varies between 8 to 16 minutes, which can leave said patient feeling that their care is greatly reduced. But, because of time-demanding factors, healthcare professionals have only so much time to offer.
Reason 8: Long Shifts
Lastly, long, grueling shifts and hours are a common part of the medical field. Even before the pandemic, caretakers were facing down 10-to-12-hour back-to-back shifts. If the pay and stress factors weren’t enough, this adds to it.
Even the best professionals stare down long work periods, and over time that leads to excessive burnout. There’s also not much incentive to join a workforce only promising long hours at less pay.
Now, consider dictation software
Dictation software like Dragon Medical One isn’t a miracle solution, in that it can’t change the core aspects of the healthcare industry. However, it can greatly aid burnt-out doctors, clinicians, and medical professionals by addressing the issues we’ve discussed thus far.
Essentially, it comes down to saving time and reducing the burdens of administrative work wherever possible. Dictation software is used in some healthcare situations but suffers from accuracy problems. Furthermore, issues with accuracy in a medical setting, especially when it comes to patient records, can have long-term ramifications and penalties.
Reducing time on redundant tasks, cutting down on burnout, and giving them powerful tools to address the complications of burnout are advantageous indeed. Therefore, resources like the Dragon dictation software are one such powerful tool.
For more information, use our live chat; give us a call; or start your Dragon Medical One free trial today!
