Payroll and HR Challenges in Healthcare

By Laura Wootton | 08/13/2024 | 4 min read

The healthcare industry is faced with unique payroll and HR issues. Here is your chance to discover a few tips and tricks to help you tackle some of the top pain points when it comes to healthcare payroll and HR.

The top 4 challenges faced in healthcare

Regulatory Compliance

In addition to the already complex and continually evolving world of payroll and HR, the healthcare industry is tasked with additional time-consuming regulations across a series of agencies, including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). These multiple layers of regulations require a significant investment of time and resources to manage and are frequently updated and changed, so you must continually stay updated and on top of compliance requirements.

Extreme Turnover Rates

Employee turnover is a natural part of any organization; however, the healthcare field experiences a much higher turnover rate, which can damage the organization. For the average company, the employee turnover rate is around 10.6%. As a national average, hospitals have a turnover rate of 22.7%, with most hospitals turnover over 100.5% of their workforce in the past five years. Each turnover comes at a cost to the hospital.

When you only look at registered nurses (RN), the turnover of a single position will typically cost a hospital $52,350. Accounting for how many RNs are in a hospital and the average turnover rate, the average hospital will lose $8,550,000 annually solely based on the cost involved with RN turnover and does not account for physicians, doctors, pharmacists, surgeons, healthcare administrators, counselors, janitors, laboratory technicians, radiologists, or any of the other jobs and positions at a hospital that experiences the same exceedingly high turnover rates.

Rampant Workforce Shortages

There is a global shortage of qualified healthcare workers, and it’s estimated that the situation will only get worse. The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) estimates that with the increasing demand for healthcare and the decreasing size of the healthcare workforce, the discrepancy between the supply and demand for qualified healthcare providers may reach as high as 50% in some fields by 2036. In simplified terms, this would mean that there is a total demand for 100 physicians, but the total market is only able to provide 50.

This global workforce shortage stresses your existing organization, leading to burnout and turnover.

Employee Burnout

With a higher demand for qualified workers paired with a shrinking workforce, it is becoming more common for healthcare workers to experience burnout. They are asked to work longer hours, take care of more patients, and are stressed for their time, making them feel overworked, stressed, and burnt out. The NHS has found that 54% of doctors and 40% of nurses display signs of exhaustion and ‘often’ or ‘always’ feel burned out at work.

Burnout is a serious risk because employees who are burnt out become emotionally exhausted from their work. This can make them cynical and disengaged from caring for their patients, impacting a wide range of job performance and quality of life metrics.

How IRIS Payroll and HCM services can help

The healthcare industry is facing immense stress and pressure, and IRIS Payroll and HCM services can help alleviate some of that pressure. Here are three ways that IRIS can help.

Compliance Management

We simplify and automate HR and payroll compliance so you can focus on projects that matter. We’ll help you remain compliant with local, state, and federal regulations. We can even help you meet industry best practices to ensure you can streamline your HR and payroll workflows.

Automation

HR and payroll services can feel repetitive, which makes it easy to make simple data entry errors that only require you to do more work to fix. Automation removes repetitive tasks from your workflow and significantly reduces your error rate, giving your team more time to focus on other projects.

Simplify Reports and Administration

You can’t make decisions about your organization without up-to-date information, which is why consistent, relevant, and up-to-date reports are a necessity. IRIS makes generating reports easy, allowing you to have the information you need in an accessible, easy-to-understand format whenever you need it.

Simplify Your HR and Payroll with IRIS Payroll and HCM Services

IRIS can help your organization simplify its HR and payroll processes. Get started today and discover the difference IRIS Payroll & HCM Services can make for your healthcare organization.