How Automation is Transforming Healthcare Practices

Did you know that close to 90% of healthcare organizations have implemented automation in some form?

This number reflects a drastic increase from previous years, as it’s becoming apparent that automation technologies can bring a host of benefits to the healthcare industry, including reducing medical errors, boosting operational efficiency, and increasing patient satisfaction.

This article explores the various applications of automation in healthcare and what healthcare facilities can do now to maximize the benefits of finding automated solutions for both patients and the healthcare workforce as a whole.

Understanding Automation in Healthcare

When people hear the term “healthcare automation,” it can lead to confusion because the term can mean different things in different situations. To keep everyone on the same page, we’ll provide our interpretation of what it means to implement automated healthcare solutions and share the most significant benefits of healthcare automation.

Defining Automation in the Medical Field

Automation in healthcare involves using software and tools to streamline operations, enhance communication, and boost productivity. It includes systems for patient scheduling, reminders, data management, and telehealth services, aiming to improve patient care and reduce manual tasks for healthcare professionals.

Artificial intelligence technology, including natural language processing, is a key component of healthcare system automation, allowing administrative processes and repetitive tasks to be carried out without human intervention. There’s practically no limit to using automation, particularly in areas like diagnosis, treatment, patient monitoring, and laboratory procedures.   

The Benefits of Implementing Automation

 The benefits of automation in the healthcare industry are vast and as the technology improves manual processes and time-consuming tasks can be replaced by automated processes on an ever-increasing scale.

Enhancing Patient Care and Satisfaction

Striving for the highest level of patient satisfaction is at the heart of the healthcare industry. Automation tools can be instrumental in improving patient outcomes.

Here’s a glimpse into how automated tools like appointment reminders, payments, and digital forms can improve patient engagement and satisfaction.

• Appointment reminders: Missed appointments cost the U.S. healthcare industry $150 billion per year, and appointment reminders can make a massive positive impact on this figure. As you can imagine, calling patients or sending manual texts is time-consuming.
  
  With automated Appointment Reminders being delivered via phone, text, or email, healthcare institutions can reduce the likelihood of missed appointments, encouraging patients to follow through with needed care.
   
• Payments: With Weave, offices can transition to digital invoicing, enabling Text-to-pay and Online Bill Pay, thus offering convenience to patients while significantly speeding up the collections process. The ability to send healthcare invoices via text, with a link to pay, has led to 63% of patients being more likely to quickly settle their bills​​.
   
• Digital forms: Sending patients Digital Forms through text or email automates patient intake processes, ensuring efficiency and a better patient experience. This also saves your office staff time by having the forms filled out before the patient checks in for their appointment.

Streamlining Operational Efficiency

Automating processes can dramatically reduce the time it takes to perform administrative tasks and various business processes, including appointment scheduling, patient communication, and patient billing.

Offices that take advantage of automation can free their staff from “boring,” mundane tasks and free them up to do more meaningful work, like nurturing patient relationships and focusing on patient satisfaction and care. Taking humans out of repetitive administrative tasks reduces human error, which is especially critical for busy offices experiencing an increase in patient volume.  

In addition to being able to increase patient satisfaction, automating business processes like billing can have a substantial impact on your practice’s bottom line. For example, an automated system that sends bills on autopilot, processes claims, collects payments, and handles reimbursement workflows can work to both reduce medical errors and accelerate revenue cycles. Talk about a win-win!

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Improving Data Management and Accessibility

Another benefit of automation in healthcare has to do with improving how data is managed and accessed across various health systems. When done right, automation can make it easy to capture, store, and retrieve patients’ electronic health records in real-time.

Facilitating data sharing allows for interoperability and a free exchange of information that can result in being able to deliver a patient diagnosis and treatment plan faster than ever. And, as you already know, better clinical decision-making leads to better patient outcomes and higher levels of patient satisfaction.

Overcoming Challenges and Barriers to Adoption

There’s no question that change is scary and healthcare automation can feel a bit like exploring the Wild West. Across various industries, up to 70% of people resist change. Fear of the unknown is one of the biggest barriers to change, and a loss of control is another major factor.

In the healthcare industry, additional risks and fears exist that cannot be ignored. Although many tasks in healthcare lend themselves perfectly to automation, change makers need to be sensitive to various concerns, including job displacement and data security.  

Addressing Concerns About Job Displacement

One of the biggest fears about healthcare automation is that it will lead to a reduction in jobs. Many of us grew up learning about the Legend of John Henry, the best and strongest railroad worker who was ultimately displaced by automation.

It’s a normal and rational fear to be concerned that if your job is automated, it can go away, but this line of thinking fails to look at the bigger picture of advancement and innovation. According to Harvard Business Review, automation neither creates nor destroys jobs. Instead, it transforms them.

Think of it this way: Instead of doing a series of tedious and time-consuming healthcare processes by hand, you can hand those tasks over to a machine and focus on more important things. This could include spending more face time with patients, learning more about improving treatment outcomes, and advancing your practitioner skills.

In other words, automated solutions can complement rather than replace human roles, allowing you to dedicate more resources to enhancing the capabilities of your healthcare staff. While there will likely be a period of adjustment, training, and integration with other systems to fully enable efficiencies, the benefits of automation are well worth this initial investment.

Overall, automated tools work to elevate patient care and allow office and medical personnel to focus on the human element of medical care as well as building and strengthening patient relationships. As another example, instead of tracking appointments and doing data entry, your staff can spend more time interacting and communicating with patients.

Ensuring Data Security and Privacy

There are understandable concerns about the privacy and security of patient data across automated healthcare systems. Addressing these concerns requires that healthcare automation is implemented with the utmost care to protect patient information.

Specifically, designers, administrators, and users of automation in healthcare organizations must be careful to maintain HIPAA compliance (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). This law requires sensitive and personal health information about a patient be protected and not disclosed without a patient’s consent or knowledge, even to authorized personnel.

Automation, especially if allowed to remain unchecked by any human intervention, can pose a significant risk that protected health information can escape the control of healthcare facilities and get into the wrong hands.

Healthcare organizations and healthcare providers alike should ensure that they have implemented robust security measures, including encryption, limited access, and two-factor authentication, to prevent patient data from being compromised. Further, there should be comprehensive training on various automated systems so that anyone handling the data used to treat patients knows how to adequately protect it. 

The Future of Automation in Healthcare

One word can be used to describe the future of healthcare automation: promise. As advancements in technology and healthcare systems continue to be introduced, the benefits of automation and automating processes should become even more apparent. Artificial intelligence, personalized care, remote monitoring and telehealth, and robotics all touch on automation in various aspects of healthcare, from ambulatory services to emergency rooms.  

Emerging Trends and Technologies

Technologies like AI and machine learning are changing the landscape of automation in healthcare and improving the overall patient experience. Savvy healthcare providers are looking to emerging trends and technologies in the field of automation.

For example, artificial intelligence is playing a critical role in using automation to improve the patient experience. Specifically, AI and machine learning are being used to aggregate vast amounts of current and historical data to provide healthcare providers with real-time insights, personalized treatment recommendations, and predictive analytics. When taken together, this technology can be used to deliver more accurate diagnoses, better-tailored treatment plans, and more effective medication management.

For the global population as a whole, we can expect automation-related technologies to help identify at-risk populations, facilitate preventing disease outbreaks, and optimize resource allocation. Again, all of this speaks to a positive future in which artificial intelligence and automation provide benefits to the healthcare industry.

Conclusion

 Automation is a healthcare provider tool that should be celebrated, not feared. By minimizing the time necessary to conduct manual, repetitive tasks that are subject to error, healthcare providers can focus on what’s really important – the patient experience.

However, to effectively reap the benefits of automation and achieve maximum operational efficiency, any changes to a healthcare organization need to be done in a way that respects the needs and concerns of staff members while protecting patient-related data.

This is where Weave comes in. Our all-in-one software platform delivers a suite of world-class communication tools that help automate practically any task you imagine. To see how powerful this communication and practice management platform can be for your practice, we invite you to schedule a demo.