The healthcare workplace is an ever-changing environment. It is essential to have a work environment that embraces diversity, promotes safety, and reduces potential discrimination. Unsafe workplaces can be detrimental to the success of healthcare businesses, leading to a lack of morale and productivity. Thus, ensuring a safe and diverse workplace is paramount to any organization. A workplace that fosters diversity and inclusion provides an opportunity for employees to be individuals, empowers them to reach their fullest potential, and helps different patient groups feel positive towards the organization.
Consider the innumerable people who visit clinics and hospitals each day in need of assistance. They are a cross-section of humankind, representing every race, faith, gender, and age. According to research, patients who identify with healthcare workers are more inclined to trust the healthcare facility. Additionally, they are better able to explain their illness, more likely to comprehend and adhere to the recommended course of therapy, and happier with their level of medical care.
Any organization that values diversity has a staff that is made up of people of all ages, genders, colors, and sexual orientations. In other words, it describes the situation in which a healthcare facility's medical and administrative employees represent a diverse variety of backgrounds and experiences.
Healthcare workers should be just as varied as the patients they care for, if not more so. This makes sure that everybody who enters the building will be greeted by someone who can relate to them, connect with them, and better meet their specific requirements.
Similarly, workplace safety is an equally important component for healthcare organizations that want to run successfully in today’s world. It refers to the setting in which an organization conducts business and includes all elements that influence employees' health, safety and welfare. This guarantees low employee turnover, a culture of trust, and increased efficiency and productivity.
Among many others, a lack of workplace diversity and safety leads to the following:
- Disruptions in communication.
Lack of workforce diversity can result in a breakdown in communication with patients, whether due to a language barrier, philosophical differences, variances in cultural norms (and expectations), or even cultural bias. Additionally, when patients cannot adequately convey their wants to the workforce, harmful errors may happen.
- Limited viewpoints
Lack of diversity in the healthcare workforce industry might result in a distorted viewpoint while treating patients medically, psychologically, and socially. More crucially, it could prevent critical evaluations of a patient's diagnosis, medical background, or other socioeconomic issues that might impact their health and well-being, stifling innovation and innovative thinking.
- Psychological risks
Owing to a lack of workplace safety, melancholy, attention deficit disorder, inattentiveness, or neglect can rise in the workforce. Work-related stress, weariness, harassment, and violence are examples of this sort of danger. These circumstances may therefore result in low morale, decreased output and poor quality of work, as well as a higher risk of harm. According to experts, minority workers frequently struggle with psychological safety risks brought on by stress from harassment, intimidation, poor communication, insufficient training, and job uncertainty.
How can integrated software systems improve workforce diversity and safety?
Navix Hub’s integrated Revenue Cycle Management (RCM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Electronic Medical Record (EMR) software can prevent issues of workplace diversity and safety from rising in the following ways:
No income disparities
Many Revenue cycle management software ensures that all employees are paid accurately and on time. This helps eliminate any potential discrepancies in pay that could arise due to manual or intentional errors, or miscommunication, ensuring workplace equality. Additionally, in many healthcare organizations, employees are paid differently based on their differences, even if they have worked the same amount as their counterparts. RCM systems can help ensure that all employees working on the same level are paid the same rate for the same amount of work, regardless of their gender or ethnicity.
Inclusive workforce
Issues of mental health in black people have been on the rise. According to studies, when handled by black healthcare professionals, black people experience superior outcomes. The administration of telemedicine services to patients online is made simple by CRM systems. Many patients of color now opt for telemedicine services that can connect them with a healthcare provider of their background. Thus, this demand created by CRM for diverse providers opens the doors for healthcare organizations to include them in their workforce.
Reduction in stress
In the highly stressful environment of behavioral healthcare organizations, it is important for institutions to reduce the workload on their employees as much as possible. The integration of CRM, RCM, and EMR systems can greatly help do so by streamlining time-taking and stressful processes into one place. This way, employees don't have to switch from one platform to another, log in to different portals to retrieve information on the same patient or worry about keeping patients' records safe and sound. Additionally, this integration can help to provide better customer feedback, allowing team members to identify any potential safety issues before they become a problem. Prevention of such cases can reduce employee stress levels, keeping them from psychological hazards.
Improved communication among employees
In non-diverse workplaces, communication undergoes various hurdles. It is not transparent or smooth. Employees may choose not to communicate with others based on gender, race, age, etc. By providing a centralized customer information database, Navix Hubs integrated software can help reduce the potential for such disrupted communication and misunderstandings between team members. The flow of information is tied together seamlessly, leaving no room for such non-inclusive issues to occur. This can aid in ensuring that all team members work together towards a common goal, leading to improved safety and diversity in the workplace.
Overall, taking the right steps to reduce burden, pressure, and discrimination in the workplace can help protect your employees from psychological risks while reducing employee turnover and absences. This can in turn lead to an increase in organizational growth and improved patient outcomes.
