Today much time and energy are spent by hospital staff in maintaining paper trails of emergency admissions, patient registration, medical reports, prescriptions, medical insurance documents, etc. This task is not only monotonous but also leads to human error, inefficiency, low staff morale, at increase operating costs. Modern technology has changed these repetitive and mechanical processes with efficient and automated systems.
In healthcare, workflow automation (Robotic Process Automation or RPA) is the ultimate solution to replace tiresome paperwork. These process management tools help automate the workflows of hospitals and ensure smooth operations. Not only do they make processes paperless and more organized, but they also increase overall efficiency and provide better results.
Workflow automation can help healthcare businesses in several ways:
Marketing Automation
Healthcare marketing automation is a technology-powered communication strategy that allows healthcare providers to connect with their patients on a personal basis. When marketing campaigns are based on a specific target audience, for instance, an outreach to diabetic patients, providers can widen their reach and ultimately grow their practice faster. Healthcare providers can use marketing automation to attract new patients while retaining their existing patient base.
Improve Patient Experience
Improving a patient’s experience is the outcome of an automated marketing campaign. When healthcare providers provide personalized services to their patients, healthcare consumers develop higher expectations from the providers. When healthcare providers meet the anticipated requirements, the experience inspires confidence and increases loyalty with their patients. A comprehensive patient-centric approach helps ensure patient satisfaction and convenience. An important benefit of leveraging workflow automation is an improved patient experience that keeps the care team and patient connected. This allows for consistency, better adherence, scalable, and enables healthcare providers to improve patient outcomes and satisfaction.
Patient Financial Management
The overall fiscal management of a healthcare practice will benefit from financial workflow automation since most healthcare billing processes are prone to human error and generally missing critical information. The automation of this process can ensure all the necessary tasks are performed efficiently and allow for standardization across the billing department, leading to smoother operations and increased collections. Using financial automation enables billing departments to provide the necessary outreach to patients at the right time for improved collection efforts for patient responsible balances. These automated workflows integrate within the existing system to provide seamless interaction with the patient while saving time for the billing department. For example, when patients make a payment, one of the financial automation workflows will automatically post payments back into the practice management system when a payment is made by the patient. A workflow process automation like this never stops and will post payments any time of day after the patient makes a payment.
When there are workflow automation processes in place, it enables management to view the status and progress of each step to measure its effectiveness. This enables incremental improvements to be implemented to produce better results. The audit trails created by automation can be used internally to measure various key performance measures as well as regulatory compliance. In addition, a centralized automation system not only allows decision support but also provides seamless interactions between all internal parties for smoother operations.
Improved Organizational Workflow
AI-enabled applications and end-to-end workflow automation can make documenting and maintaining data easy and well-organized. By reducing manual and human errors, healthcare providers can significantly reduce their overhead expenses. For example, one of the biggest overhead expenses is known inefficiencies with complex clinical systems and billing functions. Over time, the cost is exponential with increased staff and provider time to work within these systems. In terms of billing, an electronic transaction that is automated costs 70% less than the average cost of a manual transaction. This is one of many examples that show savings can be realized by switching to automated systems.
At HiLiteMD, we specialize in process improvement through various automation technologies that save care teams and healthcare providers time and money. Through Robotic Process Automation (RPA), healthcare care professionals will eliminate repetitive and time-consuming tasks. Our RPA platform is directly integrated with your current EMR/PM system to reduce costs further and minimize critical errors with RPA templates. We work with hospitals and physician practices to automate repetitive and important front- and back-room operations so you can focus on delivering better patient care.