With an increase in health care staffing shortages, this creates more
problems for health care administrators to comply and implement
HIPAA and HITECH federal rulings. When there are staff shortages,
the low number of qualified staff can get overworked and very
overwhelmed. The quality of healthcare provided will decrease, the
attention to detail can be compromised, and a patient's privacy can
all be at risk by overworking the health care staff. "Over the past
years many healthcare organizations have downsized by cutting the
number of skilled providers and supplementing those who have
remained with lesser-trained aides. This has produced an increased
workload for the staff that have seen their patient load increase
dramatically resulting in an insufficient number of skilled personnel
to cover patient’s needs (Shader, Broome, Broome, West & Nash,
2001)". As they get stressed, their moral and work satisfaction goes
down along with their attention to detail as they may feel rushed.
The feeling of being rushed with so many patients and not enough
staff to help can create more errors and a decrease in personal
Identifiable patient information being protected. I know this to be
true working as a medical admin the Air Force. Sometimes when
some of our already low manning number of staff gets pulled away
for TDYs, deployments, even meetings, this puts more of the
workload on us who are left behind to care for patients. Sometimes
coworkers will feel rushed to help a patient and walk away from their
computer with a different patients' HIPAA information displayed, this
creates a federal risk. We have had meetings and trainings to stress
the importance of federal regulations but sometimes the workload is
too much and that is when people either make simple mistakes
(human error from stress) or patient wait times increase which
creates angry patients. Has anyone else worked in medical admin?
What did your leadership team do to help?
References:
Richard Andrew Gabehart. (June 2003) Overwork and Stress: The
Need for Policy on Working Hours in the Healthcare
Professions https://opencommons.uconn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1040&context=uchcgs_masters
Shader, K., Broome, M. E., Broome, C. D., West, M. E., Nash, M.
(2001). Factors influencing satisfaction and anticipated turnover for
nurses in an academic center. Journal of Nursing Administration, 31
(4), 210-216.
