The situation is all too familiar in long-term care. There are not enough qualified staff to provide acceptable levels of care for residents and patients. The jobs are demanding, both physically and mentally. The schedule is frequently not family friendly. Companies in other industries are paying more money for less stressful jobs, actively poaching your best talent.

We’ve already talked about the options available for attracting and retaining good employees, but wouldn’t the job be easier if we didn’t need to hire quite so many people? This is one of the promises of automation, along with increased productivity and lower costs.

What is Automation?

OK, seems like a simple question, but automation is a major topic in global business and especially in healthcare. The concept is to leverage technology to perform certain functions that have been handled by people, leaving people to do work that can’t be easily replaced by machines.

Automation has been around for a long time. Consider the assembly line, where the product comes to the worker rather than making the worker travel to the product. Considered a major innovation when it was introduced in the automotive industry, it’s now widely implemented everywhere.

Today’s automation goes beyond the mechanical movement of physical objects. Consider Zapier, software that allows a user to string together several other applications to perform complicated tasks, freeing the user to spend time creating more value doing other work. Less stunning examples include automatic bill pay and subscription ordering through Amazon. Continue Reading >>