With the NHS facing its greatest pressures ever experienced from unprecedented low staffing and experiencing the largest patient demand than ever before, the question looms; How can healthcare move forward whilst continuing to meet the demands of an aging and expanding population? And how can Artificial Intelligence be used to support a system bursting at the seams?
As with all other industries Healthcare must look towards digital transformation and the way this can benefit patient experience whilst supporting an overused workforce. Healthcare Automation could be a gamechanger for healthcare companies, helping to revolutionise operations and patient care.
Process Automation in the healthcare industry has the potential to empower healthcare professionals to prioritise patient care, innovate in treatments, and optimise workflows, leading to improved healthcare outcomes and patient experiences.
Why Specifically Healthcare?
The NHS spends only 2% of its budget on administration, compared to other countries such as Germany (4.2%) and America (8.3%). Many administration posts over recent years have been combined, doubling workloads and causing some of the lowest employee retention rates of recent years. Some obvious benefits of Automation in Patient Care can be applied to assisting with administrative tasks therefore reducing workload and freeing up time for other tasks.
Implementing Automation in Healthcare Processes can help professionals with activities such as automating patient registration, automated data entry, appointment scheduling and booking and managing cancelled appointments.
The total cost of missed appointments in the NHS is over £216 million pounds, accounting for staff salaries, time and resources. A key benefit to automating patient care would be to producing unified communications to help manage appointments in a smart way utilising the ability to process historical data, physician availability, patient preferences with the goal of reducing missed appointments, improve communications and enhancing efficiency of healthcare services.
Other future uses of Automated Healthcare Systems within admin tasks could include support with note writing, creating timely referrals, utilising Patient Data Management Automation and further enhancements to clinical pathways.
What Impact Would Automation Have in Healthcare?
Implementing Automation in Healthcare Processes can support with real time patient monitoring, sending alerts for critical changes in vital signs or patient conditions, can help clinicians by speeding up the processing of lab tests and results, notifying healthcare providers and patients promptly.
AI in Healthcare is already transforming Healthcare with Automation Technology, with many organisations already using this technology in patient care, for example within diagnostics tools such as picture archiving and communication system (PACS), radiology information system (RIS), pathology, pharmacy and bedside monitoring.
This process can then aid in quicker diagnoses and treatment plans, facilitating timely interventions. Physicians should be able to use all the data that’s been gathered and integrated to greatly improve the speed that clinical decisions can be made, resulting in improved patient treatment and care. As such Healthcare Workflow Automation gives healthcare professionals increased confidence in their day-to-day jobs and more time to care.
Technology in Patient Care can be used for more than just improved operational efficiency. It can also be use within patient experience enhancement. Using dashboards created from multiple integrated data sources, Patient Data Management Automation can help spot and solve problems, which ultimately improves patient care.
Streamlined processes and faster service delivery improve patient satisfaction by reducing wait times, increasing access to care, and ensuring accurate and timely communication.
Healthcare Compliance and Automation and information automation aim to improve reporting and analysis and can help to ensure hospitals adhere to regulatory standards by automating compliance checks, generating reports, and flagging any deviations for review.
Using the improved quantity and quality of data will help provide more accurate clinical coding and enhance the analysis of both current and future activity.
Automation can also assist back end operations within a hospital, such as managing hospital inventory by tracking supplies, restocking items, and generating alerts for low stock levels, ensuring adequate supplies for patient care.
Ultimately use of digital transformation in the healthcare fields has the potential to enhance patient care, empower healthcare professionals, improve accuracy of data entry, billing and compliance adherence, reduce errors, mitigate risks and create significant cost savings. Advanced automated solutions in healthcare has the power to increase scalability and flexibility of essential services and improve efficiency, ultimately leading to improved patient experience and patient flow.
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