The Nursing Shortage Solution: Innovation

Nearly every practice in every specialty is feeling the strain of the nursing shortage. Nursing staff sizes continue to shrink while the needs of vulnerable patients increase. Smaller nursing staff sizes have led to nursing duties falling to physicians. This leaves physicians spread even more thin (which we didn’t think was possible) and patients subsequently frustrated with long wait times in scheduling and receiving returned phone calls on questions or concerns they have for their provider. Decreased quality of care and reduced patient satisfaction has been identified as a recipe for physician burnout. Your practice needs nurses and other certified staff to support your existing patients but also to sustain any growth. Unfortunately, the nationwide nursing shortage is expected to continue to worsen over the next 15 years. That’s fifteen. ONE FIVE. 

Pretty bleak, huh? 

Yes, but this post wasn’t written as doom-scrolling content. This is blogpost on innovative—yet simple—software and services your practice can adopt to significantly increase revenue and patient satisfaction. The dynamics that have caused the nursing shortage are complex and multifaceted but the solutions to reducing the strain it has on your practice are simple.  

Step One: Get paid for the work you are already doing by billing for Chronic Care Management (CCM) and Behavioral Health Integration (BHI) services. 

Providers across all specialties are undeniably doing the work required for the most basic CCM and BHI services, day in and day out. However, most are not billing for either service performed because the required treatment planning and time-tracking components are perceived to be cumbersome, time-consuming processes that are not worth the effort. Additionally, practice managers and physicians lack the time needed to educate themselves and their staff on the importance of CCM and BHI, services designed to improve patient outcomes by keeping them out of the hospital. Together Clinic’s software allows all users from any specialty to quickly develop a thorough, audit-proof treatment plan that is unique to your patients and their specific chronic conditions. It will intuitively track any time spent by providers and staff on qualifying care management tasks and is incredibly easy to use. Together Clinic does not require any additional time and, instead, gets you paid for the time you are already spending caring for your chronically ill patients. 

Step Two: Use Together Clinic’s full-service care managers to expand your staff size, increase revenue, and reduce onerous care coordination tasks. 

Together Clinic isn’t just a software. We are also a team of clinically licensed providers that can serve as an extension of your current nursing staff. Our trained care managers will handle burdensome and time-consuming nursing tasks—prior authorizations, medication questions, health counseling—so that your nursing staff is there to support the physicians and the patients in the office. Our goal is not to take over the care of your patients or to make treatment recommendations. Instead, we simply help providers more easily manage the care of complex patients by routinely engaging with them to track trends in vital signs and scores on validated rating scales. Together Clinic’s full-service option has helped our clients spend much less time on non-billable tasks, improve patient satisfaction through more frequent engagement, and (most importantly) significantly increase revenue. 

Together Clinic’s software and full-service offering can help revive your practice’s existing CCM/BHI programs. We can also help you easily start a CCM/BHI program from scratch! Either way, we are here to help. Start a conversation with us or schedule a demo to see how Together Clinic can decrease the pain points your practice may be feeling as a result of the nursing shortage. 

This article was written by Kelsey Daugherty, DNP – VP of Business Development for Together Clinic.