Previously, we have already covered that the current healthcare system is under an underwhelming crisis. The problem is driven by many factors and today we focus only on one of them. Across Europe, the healthcare sector is facing a crisis that threatens the foundation of care delivery: a growing shortage of doctors, nurses, and other health professionals. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates a projected shortfall of 11 million health workers by 2030, mostly in low- and lower-middle income countries. For years, policymakers have warned of an upcoming healthcare worker shortage due to retirement waves, insufficient training pipelines, and poor working conditions. Now, that future has arrived.
Workforce strain is no longer a theoretical problem. General practitioners are retiring in record numbers, hospitals struggle to fill shifts, and care delays are becoming systemic. Aging populations, the increasing burden of chronic disease, and the mental toll of pandemic-era burnout have pushed healthcare systems to the brink.
While many focus on government solutions, insurers and payors also have a critical role to play. In this blog post, based on Chapter 1.2 of our playbook "Before It Hurts: How Data Cuts Costs for Healthcare Payors", we explore the causes of the doctor shortage, its downstream effects on health outcomes and cost, and the concrete actions payors can take to help stabilize and even transform the system.
Why There Is a Workforce Crisis
In our previous blog post, we covered a bigger picture of the healthcare crisis. Today, we focus on the shortage of healthcare professionals, it is not just a staffing issue, it’s a structural, long-term crisis affecting healthcare delivery across Europe and beyond. This workforce gap spans multiple dimensions, including specialties, regions, and care settings. The crisis is not isolated to hospitals or general practices, it extends into home care, mental health, long-term care, and community-based services.
Several overlapping factors are driving this trend even further:
- Aging workforce: According to Eurostat, over 40% of Europe’s physicians are over the age of 55, with many expected to retire within the next decade. This aging trend outpaces the influx of new graduates, creating a net loss in capacity.
- Education bottlenecks: Medical and nursing schools face significant constraints, from limited faculty to caps on enrollment. Even where training slots are available, residency placements often fall short, especially in rural and underserved areas.
- Burnout and attrition: Healthcare professionals are leaving the field at alarming rates due to emotional exhaustion, administrative burdens, and unrealistic workloads. A 2023 EU survey showed that nearly half of nurses report burnout symptoms, with one in five considering career exits. You can get more information on how to reduce stress via using wearables here!
- Urban-rural imbalances: A disproportionate number of healthcare workers are based in urban areas. Meanwhile, rural regions struggle with chronic understaffing, forcing patients to travel long distances or forego care altogether.
- Foreign workforce dependency: Many European countries now rely heavily on foreign-trained doctors and nurses to fill workforce gaps. While these professionals are essential, this model introduces sustainability risks, especially if global competition for talent intensifies.
This interconnected shortage threatens not only access to care but also the quality and equity of services provided. Insurers and payors must understand these drivers in order to develop responsive, data-informed strategies that relieve the pressure and protect continuity of care.
The Cost to Insurers: Rising Claims, Poorer Outcomes
For insurers and payors, the healthcare worker shortage is more than a staffing issue, it's a financial and operational challenge with cascading impacts across the system:
- Rising claims and treatment delays: When patients cannot access timely care, minor conditions progress unchecked, resulting in more intensive and costly interventions down the line.
- Decreased clinical accuracy and continuity: Overworked physicians are more prone to diagnostic errors, miscommunication, and fragmented care coordination, leading to repeated visits and patient churn.
- Diminished member trust and loyalty: Patients increasingly associate delays, poor experiences, and administrative friction with both healthcare providers and insurers, eroding satisfaction and retention.
These compounding factors destabilize actuarial models and risk pools, driving up loss ratios and making it harder for insurers to meet value-based care objectives. The shortage is no longer just a system-wide concern, it’s a direct threat to payor performance, margin, and member experience.
Solutions to Healthcare Workforce Problems
How to Use Prevention as Leverage in Healthcare
While insurers may not be able to directly increase the number of healthcare workers, they can strategically reduce demand on strained providers through digital-first strategies. By leveraging mobile health tools and preventive infrastructure, payors can play a pivotal role in easing systemic pressure. We have covered in depth the predictive approach in our blog post here.
Key strategies include:
- Scaling mobile health services: Mobile-first platforms, powered by SDKs, can deliver care asynchronously and remotely, reducing the dependency on in-person consultations. We have covered that in our remote work blog post!
- Real-time risk monitoring via mobile SDKs: Continuous biometric tracking through smartphones and wearables allows early detection of health risks, helping prevent escalation.
- Mobile-enabled behavioral nudging: Wellness programs embedded in apps can encourage healthy routines, sleep, movement, and medication adherence, based on real-time insights.
- Facilitating self-care with mobile interfaces: Intuitive mobile apps let users track symptoms, engage with care protocols, and manage their health journeys independently, reducing routine demand on doctors.
Aging Workforce Solutions: Rebalancing the Care Model
To mitigate the growing loss of senior clinicians and the mounting pressure on general practitioners, insurers can support more distributed and digitally enabled care delivery models that extend beyond traditional physician roles:
- Task-shifting with digital augmentation: Empower nurses, midwives, and allied health professionals to take over routine and preventive tasks, supported by mobile apps and digital diagnostic tools.
- Collaborative, integrated care teams: Foster interdisciplinary teams where responsibilities are shared across physicians, behavioral health experts, nutritionists, and care coordinators to reduce provider load and improve care continuity.
- AI-driven decision support and triage tools: Implement algorithmic triage systems that help guide patients to the appropriate level of care, decreasing unnecessary doctor and emergency room visits.
- Peer support and community-led interventions: Promote community-based health models such as peer coaching and local health programs to support behavior change, manage chronic conditions, and prevent escalation without physician involvement.
These models don’t just alleviate physician bottlenecks—they create more resilient, adaptive systems capable of scaling access and quality even in the face of persistent shortages.
Burnout is a Business Risk: What Insurers Can Do
Workforce burnout is not just a staffing issue, it’s a systemic risk with direct consequences for access, outcomes, and cost. Insurers can play an active role in alleviating pressure on the clinical workforce by rethinking how care is coordinated and delivered in mobile-first environments:
- Streamlining administrative processes: Simplifying tasks like authorizations, claims processing, and documentation can significantly reduce cognitive load and time pressure on providers.
- Supporting mental health at scale: Offering digital wellness resources, burnout risk monitoring tools, and resilience training to clinical teams via mobile platforms.
- Reducing avoidable encounters: Leveraging mobile SDKs and predictive data models to detect patterns early and intervene before conditions escalate, minimizing the need for repeated or unnecessary doctor visits.
- Shaping smart workforce policy: Collaborating with policymakers and care networks to enable training incentives, regional licensing flexibility, and digitally augmented care roles.
By prioritizing mobile-first support strategies and recognizing workforce wellbeing as integral to care quality, insurers can help make care delivery more sustainable both clinically and financially.
How Real-time Data Can Solve the Workforce Crisis?
The foundation of scalable digital health innovation is built on mobile-first data infrastructure, particularly when it comes to relieving the pressure of clinician shortages. Mobile SDKs, such as those offered by Thryve, play a pivotal role in making preventive and remote care a functional reality. Check our blog post on wearable data and how it can be turned into health incentives that work!
With mobile SDK integration, insurers can:
- Collect passive biometric and behavioral data (e.g. HRV, activity, sleep) directly from smartphones and wearable devices.
- Build mobile-first preventive programs that require minimal clinician input, accelerating outreach and early intervention.
- Leverage longitudinal insights through in-app analytics and dashboards to flag health risks and automate nudges.
- Avoid redundant clinical workflows by using real-time data already collected via the mobile interface.
This isn’t about replacing doctors, it’s about using mobile-enabled data to enhance every clinical interaction, support patient self-management, and free up healthcare professionals to focus on higher-priority, complex cases. The right data infrastructure transforms how insurers can proactively manage risk at scale.
How Thryve Helps Solve Today’s Healthcare Problems
The healthcare worker shortage is no longer looming. It is here, and its effects are already across national systems. But while the challenge is structural, the solutions can start today.
Insurers are uniquely positioned to drive scalable change through prevention, technology, and better data use. By supporting new care models and reducing provider burden, payors can help relieve pressure on the system and improve outcomes across the board. Thryve’s API is built to support precisely this kind of transformation. With our help, you get:
- Seamless Device Integration: Easily connect over 500 other health monitoring devices to your platform, eliminating the need for multiple integrations.
- Standardized Biometric Models: Automatically harmonize biometric data streams, including heart rate, sleep metrics, skin temperature, activity levels, and HRV, making the data actionable and consistent across devices.
- GDPR-Compliant Infrastructure: Ensure full compliance with international privacy and security standards, including GDPR and HIPAA. All data is securely encrypted and managed according to the highest privacy requirements.
Preventive infrastructure is no longer optional. It’s the new baseline for resilience.
You can start today, so we can enjoy the healthcare tomorrow.
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