The Day-to-day Challenges of a Healthcare Business + How To Address Them

From navigating cultural competency to preventing legal issues, there are many challenges healthcare businesses face each day.

Add the pressures of maintaining proper staffing and ensuring consistent, high-quality care, and it’s clear that staying ahead takes careful planning, creative strategies, and the right tools.

In this article, we break down 7 key challenges of modern healthcare business and how to overcome them.

Challenge

Scheduling in healthcare can be tricky, with the need to balance 24/7 patient care, compliance with labor laws, and employee well-being. It can be all too easy for healthcare workers to become overwhelmed, leading to poor quality of care, burnout, absenteeism, and high turnover. 

Strategy

Use an employee scheduling app like Connecteam to create customized schedules in seconds. Consider assigning shifts based on preference, availability, or qualifications—which employees can log ahead of time—and leaving a few open for anyone to claim (with your approval). You can see at a glance who’s scheduled for each shift and send automatic updates on schedule changes to your entire team. 

While creating schedules, make sure no one works too many shifts in a row and everyone has proper breaks during their shifts. This ensures your team gets the downtime they need—which helps you stay compliant with labor laws, too.

Challenge

In healthcare, there’s no way to completely avoid patient claims, which can stem from genuine errors or patient dissatisfaction. Even with your best efforts, patients may still decide to take legal action, which puts your business at risk.

Additionally, you must comply with HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) when handling patients’ data—or risk hefty fines and legal repercussions for violations.

Strategy

While you can’t prevent claims altogether, you can mitigate the risks by ensuring your team follows proper protocols, complies with relevant healthcare regulations, adheres to industry regulations, and maintains thorough documentation. 

This means properly storing patient notes, feedback forms, incident reports, training records, and compliance checklists in a central location. A digital knowledge base is the best place for this, as you can easily track and retrieve documents whenever needed. With a platform like Connecteam, you can set up your knowledge base in minutes.

Training on compliance can also significantly reduce the risk of legal issues, as can regular audits, which can help you spot any gaps in compliance.

Challenge

Healthcare workers regularly interact with people from many cultures. If they don’t understand or respect a patient’s beliefs, values, or traditions, it can lead to miscommunication and mistrust. In turn, this can decrease patient satisfaction and even lead to allegations of discrimination.

Strategy

Provide comprehensive training on understanding cultural differences and how they influence healthcare. For instance, you might create training around how certain religious practices or cultural traditions influence the type of care your workers should provide. 

Also, give your team access to a digital knowledge base that includes resources on cultural practices, communication tips, and patient care guidelines. This way, they can quickly look up important information. 

Challenge 

Maintaining consistency and quality in healthcare is essential but often difficult, especially with busy teams. Without quick access to standardized processes, important steps can be missed. This can lead to miscommunication and reduced quality of care.

Strategy 

Use a system like Connecteam to create digital checklists and forms for all your important care processes. 

A checklist could, for instance, cover steps to confirm patient allergies before giving medication or outline discharge instructions to communicate to patients. You can also implement handover checklists to ensure patients receive clear, consistent explanations throughout their care journey.

Forms could be used to document patient consent and log incident reports, for example. They make it easy for your team to record and access critical information that can help them provide great care.

Challenge

Patients can become confused and fearful when they don’t understand their diagnoses—and medical jargon is often to blame. This can lead to frustration, distrust, and even non-compliance with treatment.

Strategy

Create a shared dictionary of plain-language explanations for medical terms and train your staff to use them. For example, instead of saying the patient has “arrhythmia,” tell them they have “an irregular heartbeat.” (This list from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) could be a good resource for inspiration as you create your dictionary.)

Store—and regularly update—this dictionary in your knowledge base so your staff can reference it whenever needed.

Challenge

It can be difficult to keep track of where your employees are, when they show up for their shifts, and how many hours they’re working—particularly if they work across different departments, on rotating schedules, or from multiple sites. This lack of oversight can impact care quality, issues with payroll, and more.

Strategy

Start tracking employees’ time and attendance digitally using an app like Connecteam. 

Healthcare workers can clock in and out from their mobile devices with a single touch, and the time clock will log time down to the second. (This accuracy ensures your staff gets paid properly for their time.) You’ll also receive instant notifications when a worker has clocked in and when so you can always see who is and isn’t on time. 

A GPS-enabled system is even better, as it allows you to verify your workers’ locations while they’re on shift. 

This way, you can address issues like tardiness or absences and ensure everyone is in the right place at the right time.

Challenge

Feedback is essential for improving patient care and employee satisfaction, but it’s easy for it to get lost, overlooked, or misinterpreted. You’ll miss opportunities for growth and improvement without a streamlined system to collect feedback. 

Strategy

Use an intuitive digital feedback platform, such as Connecteam, that enables patients and employees to easily share their thoughts and concerns. They can fill out forms on the spot from their mobile devices, and you and other managers can review and action input ASAP.

It’s also important to follow up with employees and patients on their feedback. Let them know (via email, phone call, or your business’s preferred communication method) that you’ve reviewed their feedback, and detail the steps you’re taking to address it.

Running a modern healthcare practice comes with its fair share of hurdles, but with the proper strategies and tools, you can overcome these challenges. 

Connecteam is a fantastic platform to help healthcare businesses keep their operations running smoothly. It’s HIPAA-compliant and has features for training, knowledge sharing, time tracking, scheduling, communication, and more.

Try Connecteam for free today.