How to Survive the Holiday Health Care Crunch and Build Healthier Year-Around Operations

This special time of year brings gift-giving, family celebrations and spikes in air travel. Packed planes, indoor gatherings, colder weather, shorter days and stress also open the door to unwelcome visitors like a rise in cold, COVID and flu cases; flareups of chronic conditions such as asthma and COPD; and what the American Heart Association calls “holiday heart attacks.” 

That blankets physicians’ offices in same-day appointment requests and floods medical practices, hospitals and clinics with a steady stream of sick patients anxiously awaiting treatment. Without appropriate support, it can also snowball into holiday staffing strain.

When I was in outpatient care, our office had four doctors, four residents and three administrative staff members. One holiday season, two of the three staff members called in sick. So, we were down to one person, who was scrambling to check in all of our patients. 

Before long, the doctors had to go out front to help check in people and take their vitals. Instead of leaving the office at 5 p.m., our workdays stretched until 8 p.m., and we were all frustrated. But we did it because we realized that our sick patients needed to see their doctors, and we knew that some patients traveled a long way for appointments, so it’s not fair to them to cancel.

With staff getting sick, or simply wanting to take time off to spend with friends and family, this kind of thing happens with increasing frequency during the holidays. But it’s symptomatic of a broader, year-round problem: Every practice in America is feeling the physician shortage. 

While there’s no quick fix to the clinical pipeline, hospitals and practices can protect physicians’ time through adequate staffing. This frees doctors from having to shoulder administrative tasks like prior authorizations, portal messages and billing follow-up, which add hours to their days.

Doctors want to practice medicine, not chase paperwork. Practices that invest in compliance-trained, high-caliber administrative support are best positioned to recruit and retain physicians.

Let’s unwrap five ways healthcare operations can prepare for the holiday rush, and the new year, to better serve patients and make doctor workloads more manageable and appropriate.

Examine your staffing level

Medical operations clearly understand that more patients and staff members get sick during the winter holidays, yet few prepare for that by taking steps to ensure adequate support. However, when the holiday-season avalanche of patients arrives, and doctors and staff are struggling to meet demand and all of the administrative work appointments entail, they end up regretting it.

Avoid the regret, overwhelmed staff and lost revenue by getting ahead of the problem. Take an honest look at your practice to identify where there are, or could soon be, staffing shortages. You may think you’ll be fine if you permanently or temporarily lose a staff member or two, but chances are you probably won’t be. Talk to staff and managers to understand their experiences. 

Then consider whether you need more in-house support or whether you can use remote staff. Administrative staff don’t always have to be in the office. For example, you could consider doing patient intake by phone before people arrive, reducing the chance of your workers getting sick.

For practices, the power of trained, remote administrative support can also lower costs and enable offices to see more patients, potentially multiplying their revenue three- or fourfold.

For hospitals, remote staff can also help reduce readmission rates by ensuring that patients who are released after in-house staff leave for the day make follow-up appointments, reminding patients to pick up their medications and checking in to ask if medications are working and patients are getting better. That’s valuable both for the patients and because hospitals that lower their readmissions improve their long-term reimbursement rates from Medicare.

Treat the whole problem

Liberating doctors and staff from the administrative firefighting that accelerates during the holidays entails more than adding new people to the equation. It requires a holistic approach that ensures the right candidate screening, certification, hiring, operating, scaling, security and compliance. But this all needs to happen without adding more to medical practices’ to-do lists.

Alleviate the stress and eliminate the need for long hours and costly overtime by choosing a workforce partner with deep, medical-specific experience that provides solutions that ensure you and your remote staff have everything that’s needed to set you up for success.

In your search to find the right fit, ask potential partners about their process for training candidates in healthcare-specific software and workflows. Consider whether they will actually provide you with the opportunity to meet multiple candidates. Also inquire about what support they will provide after the person or people you choose join your team.

Focus on what’s most important

It may be tempting for overloaded medical practices to load up new remote staff with all the tasks with which they could use assistance. But an office probably wouldn’t assign every task to new, locally-hired staff members, and they should resist the urge to do that to new remote staff.

The better approach is to assess the two or three tasks for which you need the most help, then work with your partner to train them on those tasks so they can help during your busiest times.

You and your workforce partner can then expand on that work to continue making your operations more and more efficient and capitalize on your practice’s opportunities for growth. 

Position for long-term health

AI is both the present and the future. A lot of EHRs already have AI built in. AI-based revenue cycle management can also enable operations to address billing, claims and follow up more efficiently. If your staff doesn’t know how to use AI capabilities, you will be at a disadvantage.

Integrating AI into your marketing efforts can also make your organization more competitive. With the right training and AI tools, staff can produce more content than humans could alone.

Select a workforce partner that combines, people, process and technology to enable you to make doctor and staff workloads more manageable while modernizing your operations to save money, increase administrative productivity and reduce recruitment time. This will improve billing, insurance and patient coordination, and empower you to scale efficiently.

Provide the best experience – for everyone

Administrative overload may seem like a small issue, but it can lead to death by a thousand cuts. 

Just consider the long list of administrative tasks that hospitals and medical practices must do: 

• appointment scheduling, incoming calls and patient inquiries
• assigning standardized codes to patient diagnoses and procedures for billing purposes
• confirming patient eligibility for specific treatments or programs
• documenting patient encounters in real-time during telehealth and in-person visits
• processing insurance claims, billing and payments
• securing prior authorizations for procedures and treatments from insurance providers

When medical clinics and practices and hospitals don’t have adequate staff to handle these important tasks, it creates big operational problems – keeping doctors and administrative staff overwhelmed and prompting them to explore jobs that promise to deliver better experiences. 

With the right workforce partner, you can provide the best experiences to serve and keep your patients, your staff and your doctors. Delivering quality experiences also better positions you to attract new doctors because when you have the right infrastructure and support, it signals they can focus on patients, not bureaucracy. That’s a critical differentiator in a competitive hiring market – and it benefits doctors, staff and patients during the holiday season and every day.