Despite all odds, the healthcare industry has made it through myriad challenges in the last several years. Now, with a global pandemic in the rearview mirror, the healthcare industry is back to facing many of the same critical issues it did before (and a few new ones): longer wait lists, doctor shortages, rising prices for healthcare services, and out-of-date IT infrastructure.
With industries of every kind now embracing AI to solve their most complex problems, healthcare organizations are breaking down barriers to implement new Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) solutions.
The key to success? Process mining.
What is Process Mining?
Every process step leaves behind digital “fingerprints” (such as log data) in the transactional systems you use. Process mining uses these digital fingerprints to reveal an organization’s processes as they really are, uncovering opportunities to improve efficiencies and add value. Process mining technology can then model, analyze, and optimize business processes.
Instead of watching how a business runs through reports and dashboards, process mining shows executives a detailed list of their employees and the systems they have in place.
Using this deeper understanding, executives can improve their company’s speed and efficiency in a given process.
How Process Mining is Used in Healthcare
The healthcare industry is full of data and processes.
Healthcare data can be found in documents like patient health records, monitoring information, appointment booking systems, and payment schemes.
There’s so much data in a given healthcare system, however, that it’s hard to organize it all into a realistic picture of what really happens inside a hospital.
With process mining, a hospital can process digital fingerprints created in nearly any IT application, including Electronic Health Records (HER), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, and Lab Information Management Software (LIMS). This information can be extracted rapidly, combined, and reconstructed into a digital form in an instant.
Process mining means organizations can easily visualize and improve processes like patient check-ins, evaluation and diagnosis, treatment, medication, continued care, billing, and more. Process mining also helps management teams identify bottlenecks in a process that are usually caused by the manual input of a real employee. It also helps to introduce improvements for a given process.
Process mining also shows the user why some processes are faster than others. In addition, it also analyzes the time between two different events to compare efficiency between different departments, regions, or specific employees.
When it comes to cost, process mining providers can point out incident types that add extra time and cost to a process. Once this is identified, then the healthcare organization can decide how they want to handle it.
You need a partner
With digital transformation and AI solutions becoming key objectives for many healthcare organizations, process improvement is a necessary first step to ensure success. Before AI and process automation can really contribute to lifting the ever-increasing burden on healthcare’s frontline workers, the processes themselves need to be more efficient. Knowing where to begin can be overwhelming. We’d love to help. SimpliSmart’s intelligent automation solutions all begin with comprehensive process mining to ensure we’re not automating inefficiencies or flawed processes. Ready to learn more? We’d love to talk.
