Even while hospitals and health systems use technology regularly, many tasks are still completed by hand. The view of healthcare as an industry where time-consuming and expensive manual workflows are the norm, as well as the availability of high-quality care at a single institution, are all impacted by the inefficient use of scarce resources. By streamlining clinical and administrative procedures, automation in the healthcare industry can increase productivity, reduce errors, and boost employee engagement across the board.
Using technology to lessen human interaction in a variety of operations, from administrative and supply chain management to clinical documentation and patient monitoring, is the focus of business process automation in the healthcare industry. The majority of healthcare automation use cases take place in the background, handling anything from invoicing and appointment scheduling to data analysis and predictive modeling. The goal of automation is always the same: To relieve healthcare workers of the weight of monotonous work so they can concentrate on clinical and operational excellence.
What is healthcare automation?
Managing several workflows at once, including case management, care coordination, patient involvement, remote monitoring, data analysis, staffing, scheduling, invoicing, and budgeting, is one of the numerous difficulties facing the healthcare sector. It takes a lot of time, money, and resources to manage these procedures by hand. Automation can increase productivity, eliminate bottlenecks, and streamline these processes. Because of this, healthcare institutions are spending a lot of money on automation and are probably going to keep doing so. The global healthcare automation market is expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 8.7%, from its estimated $38 billion in 2024 to $63 billion by the end of 2030.
Working of automation in healthcare
There are three ways that healthcare automation benefits patients. One is that staff members have more time to spend with patients when they are not burdened with repetitive physical activities, whether they are clinical or administrative. Improved diagnosis and treatment are additional advantages. AI developments enable the rapid automation of the examination of massive data sets, including imaging test results and medical records, in order to spot apparent irregularities. The ability of automation to expedite a patient’s interactions with the healthcare system both during and between visits is the third advantage. Patients no longer need to make as many phone calls or complete as due to automated systems for appointment scheduling, bill sending and payment, intake form completion, record uploading, insurance verification, prescription refills, and referral requests. Patients are less likely to miss appointments or have unmet care needs as a result of the care process and back-office administration becoming more efficient.
Benefit from healthcare automation
Numerous advantages that automation offers individuals also benefit health institutions. Workers would have higher productivity, for example, when they are not busy with data entry, telephone calls, paperwork, and similar manual officiating. Whereas the staff doing the operations can focus more on their strategic projects, such as the supply chain optimization, budget forecasting, and data accessibility, the clinical staff can focus on patient care. More generally, automation has the potential to improve efficiency and reduce expenses in almost every area of a healthcare company.
Along with saving time and money on formerly manual processes, automating a variety of financial, clinical, operational, and customer service workflows can increase productivity both in the back office and on the front lines of patient care.
Applications of healthcare automation
Automation may be applied to many healthcare processes. Automation can also lighten a diverse range of challenging responsibilities, such as the administration of clinical and financial information, hospital inpatient and home-based patient treatment, and ensuring security and compliance. The following are common automations in healthcare.
1. Onboarding and intake of patients automatically
Under the traditional practice, patients will complete forms of their insurance information, their medical history, and demographics, and the forms will be handed to office staff to paste into an electronic health record (EHR) or a practice management system. This institute is cumbersome and laborious, and it is subject to error. Data extraction technologies do the work instead of manual data input; instead of requiring a person to input data, they consume documents and identify the text contained in them and match it to the field in a software program. Similar outcomes in terms of lowering errors and raising staff productivity can be obtained by using electronic intake forms that patients complete online.
2. Scheduling appointments and automated reminders
Sometimes it can be challenging to schedule appointments because of the potential violations of schedule and the variety of factors that must be considered when choosing the most qualified provider for a patient who may need medical help in such a particular case. Online scheduling reduces the number of phone calls that are made to healthcare providers, and automated scheduling systems are well-equipped with the characteristics of meeting those standards. For the scheduling system and patients to receive the most recent information about the availability and practices of physicians, integration with EHR and practice management systems is essential. In a similar vein, paper or phone reminders are useful yet ineffective. It’s easy for patients to overlook a voicemail or misplace a card or slip of paper.
3. Automation of data entry, extraction, and reporting
Paper-based patient records can benefit from the same data extraction technology that makes data entry for patient intake more efficient. This is now necessary to fill in the gaps in records and give healthcare institutions more thorough patient medical histories. Similar to this, generative AI in conjunction with natural language processing capabilities may evaluate unstructured data and generate reports that are useful for auditing and compliance teams, as well as clinical applications like visit summaries or radiology evaluations.
4. Automated processing of insurance claims, billing, and payments
Billing automation is either being used or is being implemented in nearly three out of four health systems. One significant advantage is that, according to Deloitte, this kind of automation can free up almost half of a revenue cycle professional’s time. Frontend responsibilities like financial clearance and medical procedure preauthorization, midcycle tasks like coding and documentation, and backend processes like claims processing, payment integrity, and collections can all be automated in this case.
5. Automation of Cybersecurity and Compliance Administration
Because teams spend less time collecting data and producing reports, automation improves the efficiency of the compliance reporting process. Because IT teams can set up system usage and access privileges that assist in enforcing compliance by prohibiting unauthorized access to sensitive information, automated technologies also lend themselves to more compliance than manual operations. Furthermore, cybersecurity technologies are developing to automatically scan networks and separate real threats from a high number of “false positives,” relieving IT security professionals of a significant burden. It is anticipated that this capability will develop quickly and spread more widely. Some sophisticated security systems can even be set up to automatically mitigate the dangers they detect.
The future of healthcare automation
Here are some future examples of healthcare automation.
1. Artificial intelligence
In the development of AI, it may revolutionize healthcare automation. The smartest AI solutions could identify those people who are most likely to get sick and propose specific treatments. Virtual assistants would be used to answer the routine questions on clinical or administrative grounds and may not need the assistance of human beings. On the back end, AI capabilities are anticipated to significantly enhance predictive analytics, which will assist health systems in more effectively allocating funds and resources to enhance care and care efficiency for certain populations and/or in particular regions.
2. Analytics for prediction
Healthcare organizations could move away from a reactive approach to business planning, budgeting, and service delivery if they were able to estimate risk more precisely. By predicting risk in specific patients or subgroups of patients, interventions like lifestyle modifications or screenings could be implemented to stop the development of a complicated chronic illness and the subsequent requirement for continuous care.
3. Customized healthcare
It is anticipated that automation would lead to more individualized patient communications. That includes high-value interactions in addition to reminders for appointments and prescription refills. Because care teams may offer more focused treatment suggestions by analyzing comprehensive patient records, personalization is crucial to patient care.
Conclusion
Hospitals and healthcare systems are currently faced with the pressure of cutting costs and increasing productivity. Automation is one of the elements of optimal company processes, and it enables companies to improve production without compromising the quality and effectiveness of treatment and disrupting valuable relationships they have established with their patients. When done correctly, automation will enhance the job that staff members already perform, from the front lines of patient care to the back office, and improve the security of crucial procedures for data access, sharing, and management over manual labor. In addition to better meeting the requirements of patients and staff, this helps healthcare companies get ready for future difficulties.
Additionally, Oxford Training Centre offers Healthcare Management Training Courses designed to equip healthcare professionals with essential skills in strategic planning, policy implementation, and operational oversight to lead effectively in a rapidly evolving healthcare environment.