Research Report
Health systems worldwide are at a breaking point. Changing demographics, competitive demands and workforce constraints are making traditional healthcare models unsustainable. The shortage of clinicians is affecting patient and worker experiences, which can negatively impact health organizations’ performance. It is simply impossible to hire or train one’s way out of this challenge. The only way forward is to fundamentally rethink ways of working, reimagining how technology and human ingenuity can help improve access, experience and outcomes for all.
A complete reinvention of care delivery includes using technology to augment clinician capacity and lift the burden off caregivers, enabling them to do what they do best—help people. It involves bringing services closer to patients and enabling providers to deliver care anywhere—from home to hospital, at any time. A reinvention will also renew the organization’s culture and spirit, building the resilience and agility to always adapt to change.
What will a reinvention of care delivery yield? Labor costs go down, operating margins improve and health systems support their patient and workforce while also driving growth. Transformation must happen and it will happen with the right resources.
Imagine a reinvention of care delivery that uses technology to systematically delegate tasks to employees with the right licensure so that clinicians can focus on what they were trained to do.
Four key actions to reinvent care delivery
A reinvention of care delivery uses technology to optimize clinical time so healthcare workers can focus on care that is meaningful for them and the patients they serve. Here’s how:
- Address workforce capacity: Scale clinical capacity and sustain it, organizations must stabilize the existing healthcare workforce by integrating technology that can take on tasks and minimize burden.
- Transform teams and models: Technology-enabled care models can empower patients and teams to operate in different configurations and different environments.
- Optimize technology + human ingenuity: Reinventing clinical care and operations with technology can help with automating tasks and supporting human decision-makers with AI-driven insights.
- Humanize change: Transformed operating models will enable agile care delivery that introduces technology into the workforce while still relying on human thinking and problem solving.
How Accenture can help
Accenture Health has the skills, services and strategic partners to help healthcare organizations deliver humanized, empathetic care to people by maximizing the power of technology and human ingenuity. These are some of the ways in which we are helping our clients to reimagine their futures.
- Workforce of the Future: Accenture helps companies create a clinical workforce strategy that uses workforce analytics to optimize care processes and augment workforce capacity to ease clinical burdens.
- Care Model Transformation: We redesign care delivery models to facilitate care anywhere (including hospital at home) and behavioral health integration. We also help clients address health equity by accounting for social determinants of health.
- Intelligent Patient Journeys: Using a clinical and operational command center, clinical digital twins and applying AI and predictive modeling, care providers can transform rote patient journeys into precisely customized intelligent journeys that account for all aspects of their health and all facets of the care itself. A more precisely structured patient journey will improve both experiences and outcomes.
- Clinical Performance Improvement: We use clinical value targeting and clinical operations optimization to help healthcare organizations capture new revenue, make the most of physician networks and help care providers manage population health.
- Provider Technology and Analytics Platforms: Accenture works with clients to use clinical robotics and human insights to boost the impact of electronic medical records and clinical systems. Interoperable systems and clinical task automation provide a sound foundation for reinvented care delivery.
- PruittHealth grows access to post-acute care for seniors: Accenture helps PruittHealth rebuild and grow its skilled nursing facility business.
Our leaders
Rich Birhanzel
Senior Managing Director – Global Health Lead
Kaveh Safavi, MD, JD
Senior Managing Director – Consulting Global Health
Tejash Shah, MD
Managing Director – Health