This year and half have challenged every country’s health care system.
Any amount infrastructure, resources were just not enough. Health care providers had to find a way to screen, treat and then vaccinate large swaths of the population against a highly contagious, deadly virus.
Every challenge has an opportunity. This was the kind of a challenge made for a company like Amazon. If there’s one thing the Seattle-based tech giant is known for, it’s efficiency.
Amazon had been mulling a health care play for years, well before most people had ever heard the word “coronavirus.” But suddenly, there was a newfound urgency around delivering health care that was fast, convenient — and virtual. The tech giant is now building out its Amazon Care business, which aims to provide on-demand health care services to its own workforce and other U.S. employers. The service connects people with doctors and nurses through an app. Patients can also get lab tests and exams in their homes, or have prescriptions delivered to their doors.
The pandemic has created demand for people with other skill sets who want to solve health care problems, including engineers to build telehealth portals and data scientists to help hospitals predict their staffing needs.
To respond to the pandemic, some larger health systems, like Kaiser, were able to move clinicians from non-acute roles to acute care. But for smaller, standalone hospitals, there is no clear system to transfer workers from, say, urban to rural hospitals, and those roles were filled mostly by volunteers. Float and travel nurses ended up filling much of the excess demand.
Another Major player in Healthcare CVS Health started rapidly hiring pharmacists, nurses and technicians; till date they have added almost 65,000 and already provided vaccines in all 50 states. CVS sees their role evolving one step further, into health promotion and education. Its vaccination programs are running in stores as well as long-term care facilities and onsite clinics for employers.
The same was true at Walmart with more than a 150% increase in demand for pharmacists. Walmart is offering the vaccine in 49 states, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico. Walmart offered sign-on bonuses to hire additional talented pharmacists and pharmacy techs, with referral bonuses for our existing pharmacy associates.
Demand is also expected to remain strong for mental health professionals, who were highly sought out as the pandemic upended lives and livelihoods and forced people into social isolation. Both Kaiser and HCA rapidly increased their number of mental health specialists, a position that saw twice as much demand as the previous year.
Home health is another area where there was demand health workers care for sicker and more complicated patients. Families began to resist sending their loved ones to nursing homes as infections tore through those facilities; residents accounted for about 40% of all COVID-19 deaths during the first wave. The home health industry is bringing in people who lost their jobs in other fields. Among the industries with transferable skills like people from Food service and hospitality sector who lost jobs during pandemic.
What will all this demand add up to? Potential talent wars. And health care organizations may soon find themselves in competition with the likes of new entrants. Amazon Care is actively hiring nurses and doctors in addition to traditional tech roles like software engineers and product managers. And this year, it plans to launch its chat-with-a-nurse virtual service as well as in-person care.
Federal and state governments are relying on public health experts to guide them on decisions like when and how to reopen schools. And private employers have the same questions about how to safely bring workers back into offices.
Many tech companies are summoning the skills they have in-house to address health care needs. Deloitte has created two pandemic-related task forces, one focused on how to keep people safe and the other on how to bring employees back to the office. Both teams rely on internal talent and include epidemiologists, psychiatrists, and other physicians. At IBM research team shifted from using blockchain technology for banking products to using it to create a digital health pass for vaccine verification (which became the basis for New York’s Excelsior Pass).
What does this mean for the healthcare workers or those aspiring a career in healthcare? A greater need and demand for healthcare in all forms, while workers are wanting to leave the field due to burnout and exhaustion. Those already in it Nurses, Clinical Technicians, pharmacists many are choosing the travel 12- or 13-week contract option, double the pay with lodging so they can work fewer weeks a year. It is beneficial pay wise but lacks benefits and continuity of patient care and team atmosphere suffers.
Shardul Bhatt 