At a time where healthcare costs continue to rise, health systems are increasingly turning to technology as their secret weapon to boost their bottom line.
Many hospital and health system IT leaders recently told Becker's that they were piloting several different technologies with the aim of streamlining administrative processes to reduce their bottom lines.
Linda Stevenson, CIO of Norwalk, Ohio-based Fisher-Titus Health said her health system has developed an enterprise analytics team that is building key dashboards for executive level and service line level monitoring.
"Providing the right data to the right people is key to ensuring we can manage our revenue and costs," she said. "To ensure that our leaders are ready to digest this more comprehensive set of information, we are also planning for a focus on data literacy with a training program to be completed this fall."
Jared Antczak, chief digital officer of Sioux Falls, S.D.-based Sanford Health, said the organization has been using technology to automate manual tasks so that its workforce can focus their time and attention on more important responsibilities.
Mr. Antczak also said Sanford has launched a new digital registration experience that has enabled patients to self-serve their check-in process.
"The engagement from our patients has been incredibly high, resulting in reduced no-show rates, increased co-payment and prior balance collections, increased patient satisfaction, and significant workforce hours saved," he said. "Digital transformation is one of the smartest things we have done and will continue to do for the benefit of our organization and our patients."
Ginny Torno, administrative director of innovation and IT clinical, ancillary, research systems at Houston Methodist, said the innovation team at the health system has been piloting several technologies to transform patient care and reduce the impact on the system's bottom line.
"We are currently planning a system-wide expansion of BioIntellisense's Bio Button technology," he said. "This technology captures multiple patient vitals and trends them over time, as well as capturing the data in Epic."
Houston Methodist is also piloting platforms that enable virtual visits in the inpatient setting.
"All of this and more is under an umbrella project we call "Care Redesign," Mr. Torno said. "We plan to reduce the bottom line impact while improving patient and care team satisfaction."