Healthcare
5 Reasons Why Automation is Helpful in the Healthcare Industry
Every industry was being revolutionised by automation even before the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the healthcare industry got a massive push towards automation only post-pandemic. Although the push for automation was forced, it ensured that the healthcare industry realised its benefits, almost immediately.
Automation in the healthcare industry is not limited to advancements in medicine and medical equipment only. It involves the use of tools and technologies that help with the reduction of human intervention in general medical services, including administration processes, monitoring, billing, and diagnostics.
As per data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), a primary care physician spends over 3 hours a day (over 100 hours a month!) only on documentation.
Any process that requires more effort to complete than the benefit it provides needs to be automated. It could be as simple as booking appointments or something more complex, like a remote patient monitoring system using a wearable device.
Every healthcare organisation desires to improve its efficiency and effectiveness to achieve beneficial outcomes. Adapting to automation provides these five key benefits:
Simplification of Administration
Communication Betterment
Data Management Made Simple
Labour/Cost Optimization
Elimination of Errors
Automated scheduling helps healthcare workers manage appointments conveniently. The simplification of the appointment booking process results in a reduction of patient no-shows, as well as in improved patient order management.
The usage of automation helps in bringing agility* to a time-consuming process like patient billing too. It ensures efficient administrative time and money expenses by reducing or eliminating any potential errors. This also allows for shortening the medical claims handling process time by cutting out the paperwork.
One of the primary factors impacting patient satisfaction is hassle-free, timely healthcare. With automated communication methods like chatbots, communicating with patients becomes easy and effective, leading to an improvement in their satisfaction level. These bots can help schedule bookings, capture key patient information, set automated reminders of appointments, as well as provide follow-up care instructions.
With the automated management of feedback, continual improvements in the healthcare processes can be triggered conveniently.
Any data that is collected from the patient is valuable in healthcare. Automation not only helps in easily collecting patient data, but also with an improvement in decision-making by giving insights into the patient’s history, background, and demography. This data is also useful for other diagnostic enhancements like Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR).
Along with capturing the Protected Health Information (PHI) and Personally Identifiable Information (PII) of patients, comes the burden of complying with the healthcare regulations on data privacy. With automated healthcare solutions ensuring that only authorised personnel can access this information, compliance becomes guaranteed.
Automated services can take care of the most mundane tasks being performed by healthcare workers. This leads to happier and more productive employees and also optimises employee training and onboarding costs.
During peak pandemic times, stress on the healthcare workers increased drastically, leading to employee burnout. Staff workload in such scenarios can be managed more effectively using healthcare automation services, thereby improving their efficiency and reducing stress levels.
Doctors are notorious for having the worst handwriting among all professionals. Automation allows the reduction or elimination of these errors due to their diagnosis and subsequent prescriptions being lost in translation. Organisations can take better care of their patients by eliminating any manual errors that could result in an incorrect diagnosis or unnecessary rework.
Reluctance to change
Organisations need to address common challenges before adapting to automation.
- Reassure the staff that automation is not replacing their jobs; instead, it is only going to help them do it better and fast
- Emphasise the Return of Investment (ROI) of automation to all the members who are sceptical about the cost of automation
- Clarify with mistrusting patients about the benefits of automated care
The future of healthcare is through automation. It has been statistically proven that when you add a digital workforce to your organisation, work gets done 85% faster, it is 95% more accurate, and it gives people back their time so they can take care of higher-value tasks.
Automation results in benefits for all: patients, clinicians, administrative support staff, and organisations.
*For organizations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed on organizational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like a living organism, will be imperative for business excellence going forward. A comprehensive, yet modular suite of services is doing exactly that. Equipping organizations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organizations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.
