Intelligent automation is quickly becoming a staple in many industries, including healthcare. Workflows and patient care in the healthcare industry can be improved and optimized with intelligent automation. However, many healthcare professionals have never heard of intelligent automation or understand how to use it in their organization. This article will explain why automation is good news for the healthcare industry and outline ways it can help improve key healthcare workflows, reduce costs, and enhance patient care.
Changing Needs in Healthcare
The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed change, accelerating the implementation and adoption of public health interventions. As a result, a new healthcare delivery model is emerging, emphasizing preventive measures, remote treatment, and a significant technological reliance. The most notable changes directly related to coping with COVID-19 include increased demand for mental health services, advanced telemedicine services, and the considerable stresses of managing the supply chain for personal protective equipment (PPE), essential medicines, and diagnostic serological tests. Given these factors, COVID-19 has changed business models in basic academic medicine, public health surveillance, and industry as a whole.
The recent pandemic has also created new needs for healthcare patients. Patients are turning towards a consumer-driven outlook regarding their care and expect choice, timeliness, and personalization from their healthcare providers. To meet these needs, healthcare organizations are using various standard tools to automate routine processes and analytics tools to analyze data retrospectively in search of information to achieve positive patient outcomes and reduce delivery costs. The integration of entirely virtual and near-virtual healthcare solutions brings care closer to home, making it easier for patients to access care when they need it and making them more likely to take the proper steps to manage their care. These solutions can also cause healthcare to be more efficient.
Automation In Healthcare
Intelligent automation can enhance many of the rundown and clogged processes of healthcare. By automating healthcare operations, organizations are changing and improving the quality of patient care. Intelligent automation can enhance healthcare workflows by automating time-consuming and repetitive tasks. Intelligent automation can also use artificial intelligence (AI) to decide how best to optimize workflows. AI can analyze data from patients and healthcare providers to make suggestions for improvement. This technology can help to ensure that healthcare processes are as efficient as possible. By automating medical processes, hospitals can improve clinical accuracy, reduce human error, improve patient satisfaction, and increase research productivity. Automation solutions can save millions of dollars while improving patient satisfaction.
Workflow automation technology can entirely redefine health information management processes, reduce staff burnout, increase revenue, and improve interoperability. Staff burnout damages morale, patients, and profits. Automating the search and processing of data saves time on administration, which gives more time for patient care. Implementing RPA helps healthcare professionals automate these workflows and achieve better results faster. By automating workflows, organizations can reduce operational inefficiencies that result in system-wide waste. By applying intelligent automation to processes such as checking user account status and notifying administrators of incomplete complaints, healthcare organizations can save hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in employee payroll costs.
Data collected through automation helps healthcare professionals make better decisions and deliver better patient care. For example, providers wishing to create a mobile check-in and visit can use intelligent automation to extract patient data during previous visits and automatically populate fields in an electronic health record. Based on patient information collected in PMS, robots can be deployed to automate the discharge cycle, including post-discharge instructions such as appointment, follow-up, recommendations, and approval from facility staff, thereby reducing administration time and managing multiple patients at a time. In addition to creating new patient experiences that provide more care, intelligent automation promises to generate more data to improve patient outcomes. This fusion of automation technologies enables the healthcare industry to streamline processes, increase business resilience, reduce risk, and gain actionable insights.
By integrating robotic process automation (RPA) with artificial intelligence (AI), healthcare professionals can automate complex end-to-end processes with many automated decision points, even based on clear rules. RPA allows healthcare systems to extend the FHIR APIs many EHR vendors provide, accelerating their adoption by providing an additional way to work with EHR data. With RPA, you can transfer patient data efficiently and optimize it for analysis, improving patient outcomes.
Closing care gaps is another example of hundreds of flows that can be automated in areas such as population health, patient access, and income cycle management. In addition to improving patient care, automating the closure of care gaps also reduces the number of outbound calls and data entry required for staff to bring new or existing patients to the door. Physicians can save over 700 hours each year by automating repetitive manual tasks, allowing them to spend more time caring for patients and less paperwork.
The goal of automating clinical process tasks is to give doctors, nurses, and other physicians a break from repetitive tasks that distract them from patient care. Software robots ("bots") created by the RPA component in intelligent automation can perform the mechanical functions necessary for positive patient outcomes but distract from the tasks of doctors facing the patient. Intelligent automation, on the other hand, accelerates these BPA and RPA capabilities, allowing the system to make complex decisions for highly professional tasks with structured and unstructured datasets.
Intelligent automation has played a vital role in the technological rethinking of healthcare; the rationalization of digitalization, acceleration of processes, and implementation of efficiency are impossible otherwise. Nearly half (48%) of healthcare leaders say they use intelligent automation for their IT operations, and almost as many (47%) use it for customer-facing processes, according to Accenture. With intelligent automation, we can unlock the potential of medical technology to improve the quality and efficiency of care while minimizing operating costs. Medical organizations can also use the power of intelligent automation by simplifying appointment scheduling and patient registration, improving the efficiency of the unloading process, and better managing the supply chain.
Why Originate?
The benefits of automation are clear, and healthcare providers should consider implementing intelligent automation into their workflows. Automation and Artificial Intelligence can speed up processes, improve accuracy, speed up processes, reduce risk and potential for human error, and free nurses and doctors to focus on more critical tasks. In addition, automated systems are scalable and can be adapted to meet the needs of any healthcare organization. For healthcare providers, intelligent automation is a valuable tool for improving workflows and providing better patient care.
We understand the vital importance of healthcare operations. Our team of experts is here to help you find solutions and build the future of your business. Drop us a note if you want more information about how Originate can create intelligent automation solutions for you today!