With demand on healthcare providers and clinicians increasing, many are looking for solutions for streamlining operations, improving patient care, and enhancing clinical work. By embracing Intelligent Automation, hospitals and clinicians alike are discovering how automation and technology can transform healthcare services.
What is Intelligent Automation?
Intelligent Automation (IA) uses various automation technologies to automate repetitive tasks, gather useful data, and support informed decision-making. It frees your teams from the mundane and repetitive tasks of the day-to-day, and empowers them to spend more time on the complex tasks that only they can do.
The US Government Accountability Office claims that 10-50% of tasks inside a given business could be automated, and many predictions say that the global automation industry has surpassed a worth of more than $5 billion.
The Benefits of Intelligent Automation in Healthcare
Automation helps stakeholders by streamlining workflows but, surprisingly, automation inside the healthcare industry is still not that widespread.
This is mainly due to concerns around logistics and initial deployment challenges, implementation costs, and resistance to change from executive level. But those fears are usually just a fear of the unknown. Taking the time to understand the benefits, hospitals and clinicians quickly begin to see how intelligent automation can help them better serve their business needs and their patients.
Patients can receive better quality care and have more efficient access to it. Healthcare workers can tend to more critical tasks and services can be streamlined while funds are allocated to other important areas.
How to Improve Record Keeping and Data Sharing with IA
Health data can come from many different sources, such as third-party portals, insurance companies, appointment schedulers, and more.
Intelligent Automation reduces the amount of mundane administrative tasks by intelligently processing patient records. There are estimates that the healthcare industry spends more than $2 billion on poorly executed manual data management which is prone to costly errors. This is a perfect use case for automated solutions, as they increase the accuracy and efficiency of this data entry.
How Automation Improves Security
Intelligent Automation can also help with ensuring online data sharing is following the right privacy protocols, regulating the correct access rights, and more. These solutions also enable faster detection and response times in the event of a security breach — an increasing concern among both hospitals and healthcare providers.
Intelligent Automation can strengthen a hospital’s cybersecurity through more secure and accurate data controls, improved privacy, and ensuring rigid compliance.
How Automation Helps with Appointment Scheduling
Although appointments are easy to make over the phone for the patient, scheduling appointments is a time-consuming task for healthcare workers. Because this process is so simple, however, it can easily be enhanced and the burden lessened by intelligent automation.
For example, automations can increase the efficiency of an appointment scheduler by reading incoming data and creating appointments based on data regarding symptoms, diagnoses, availability of healthcare workers, and more. This gives healthcare workers more time to focus on other tasks, and faster, more efficient scheduling that places them with the right team improves patient satisfaction.
Automation for Billing, Payments, and Claims
Intelligent automation has the ability to streamline payments and process different service costs for tests, medications, and services, providing patients and providers with one cohesive and easy-to-understand bill. The accuracy of these processed bills saves time for healthcare providers and reduce issues patients may have with a bill they don’t understand. In addition to making the bill easier to digest, automation can send reminders to patients if there are any issues or delays with their payment.
Automation also makes it easier to process health claims. These claims usually take healthcare workers up to two minutes to process, but an IA solution can process them in 12 seconds. When you calculate it out, one automation “bot” could do the processing work of nearly 10 employees — all without making an error.
Nearly a quarter of claims are denied due to internal errors. Assuming each claim costs about $120, automation that mitigates these errors reduces a healthcare facility’s financial losses exponentially, saving thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) annually.
Intelligently Tracking Assets with Automation
Moveable equipment and assets such as defibrillators, ventilators, and medical pumps are crucial for providing quality care for patients. Estimates are that healthcare workers spend more than 5,500 hours a month searching for lost equipment. That’s lost time for patients, providers, and hospitals alike.
Intelligent automation solutions can be combined with digital sensors and cloud-based control panels so that assets can be quickly located by employees. They can also check equipment inventories to make sure they’re accurate, and can monitor the condition of assets to make sure they’re working properly.
Automation Benefits for Diagnostics and Data Analytics
While many hospitals and clinicians understand the importance of data and embrace technology to capture vast amounts of it every day, the real issue is that most of this data is never reviewed.
Automation solutions can analyze all of the data instantly and provide healthcare workers with real-time insights and analytics for each individual patient. With this level of insight, healthcare workers can improve the patient’s experience with improved treatment and better-informed care.
Automation Benefits for Post-Treatment Care
Patient care continues even after they’re discharged from a medical facility. Intelligent automation allows providers to go a step beyond, providing patients with automated reminders for when to take medications, or details for following a specific diet.
Automations can also motivate patients to provide certain metrics such as blood pressure or heart rate to their provider, automate the process of receiving those vitals, and notify a healthcare professional in the event of a need.
Intelligent automation solutions are a bridge between healthcare workers at a hospital and patients at home. These technology implementations make a big impact on the patient’s experience, allowing for easier at-home recovery. They also have the added benefit of freeing hospital beds for the patients who need more hands-on care.
Conclusion
Healthcare facilities are well-served to investigate and implement intelligent automation solutions that empower them to provide a higher level of quality care, drive cost savings, and increase security, while simultaneously improving the patient experience. To learn more about intelligent automation or to see if your healthcare facility is ready to automate, reach out to SimpliSmart today to start working smarter.
