New Clinical Role After COVID 19?
COVID 19 uncovered some pre-existing areas of weakness in the healthcare industry (limited PPE, anyone?) and in many individual healthcare facilities. For many, it uncovered some already weak areas.
This has made many nurses, physicians and other clinicians reconsider their careers, work life balance and future professional and personal goals. For others, you may have been furloughed or laid off or even terminated. Regardless of why, there are many considering what their next role should be.
The good news is that being a clinician provides you with so many different opportunities to be able to transition into. Your clinical expertise will serve you well in so many different positions that still involved patients but may not involve patient care. If you want a combined role, you may look into things like intravenous therapy, teaching roles, splitting an administrative role with a clinic role, etc.
Non-Direct Care Roles for Clinicians
However, if you would like to move to a role that does not require direct care but benefits from your expertise, there are many options for that too. This might be an ideal time to consider what will be the next right path for you.
Some roles that you can still utilize your clinical skills and scientific knowledge but be one step removed from the bedside or direct care are roles like informatics, clinical documentation improvement, utilization management, patient safety, risk management, quality, patient advocacy, etc. These are just a few examples that we will share some information about here.
Informatics
Informatics professionals may perform various important aspects in the organization. They are skilled in both their clinical expertise along with how to utilize technology to improve healthcare delivery. Informatics staff support the electronic health record operations.
They also support many other healthcare operations such as reference or drug libraries, “smartpumps” or other decision-making support tools, data measures. Those in this role will teach, support staff and hold training sessions.
Clinical Document Improvement Specialist
Clinical document improvement specialists keep track of data from healthcare organizations to assure they are providing quality care. They will evaluate records to record certain key elements of information (for example, how many patients are restrained). Some of their work may also make sure proper reimbursement occurs for the organization.
The role may also require contacting insurance companies. General auditing and queries for certain markers (how many patients received intravenous antibiotics within X hours, how many patients had a procedure within X hours of diagnosis, etc) will be an instrumental portion of this job.
Utilization Management
Utilization management (UM) evaluates efficiency and necessity of the care ordered. The person in this role evaluates things like inpatient admissions, total inpatient days, emergency visits, outpatient visits, long term care facility stays and home health. Depending on what company you work for and their purpose, they may do this prospectively or retrospectively or both. The ultimate goal is that patients receive good care when they need it at the right price.
Risk Management
Risk management’s goal is to reduce patient risk along with financial and liability risk. This is done by assessing risk in your institution. You will review patient safety events, track aggregate data and implement processes to help prevent errors. A large portion of time will be spent investigating patient safety events and getting to the root cause of those events. They may also interface with the liability insurer and defense attorneys that are defending the facility and/or organization as parts of lawsuits or legal claims. They may also do some education for the staff.
Healthcare Quality/Patient Safety
Healthcare quality may overlap with risk management, but in a more pure quality role, they may be evaluating data and less involved with individual errors. The more strictly quality role will not be as involved with an individual investigation of a patient safety event but will always be behind the scenes working on areas of improvement that may have stemmed from contributing factors of events. They will have standing meetings with departments in order to be a support for them. They may also be involved in committees and policy making groups.
Patient safety, quality and risk management often overlap and may be all under one umbrella role in smaller organizations. In larger or more resourced organizations, there will be more specific roles. In larger places, the roles may be combined. In both, you will work closely with the leaders and clinicians where the most common events occur. You will also help to educate staff on common areas.
Patient Advocacy or Patient Relations
Patient advocacy (sometimes referred to as patient relations) is typically the department that is the conduit for information regarding patient complaints and concerns. They may also hear positive feedback as well, but that typically goes directly to the department or office where it occurred whereas complaints may need a more neutral party and patients and their loved ones may feel more comfortable doing this through somebody who feels somewhat removed from the direct party they are concerned with. The person in this role will often facilitate meetings with patients/families and the clinicians involved.
Good News!
This is not an exhaustive list and there may be many more roles. That is one of the great aspects of healthcare. We can do so many different and interesting things with our clinical background. Additionally if you have any leadership experience, you can transfer those skills and be a leader in one of these departments too.