Cumbersome workflows continue to plague healthcare systems, resulting in staff burnout and negative patient experiences.
Intelligent automation has the potential to digitize manual workflows, refocusing staff on the patients themselves.
During a January webinar hosted by Becker's Hospital Review and sponsored by Notable Health, Muthu Alagappan, MD, chief medical officer at Notable, and Carl Selvick, PharmD, senior director of clinic operations at Wisconsin-based Fort HealthCare, discussed the market forces driving intelligent automation, the dual mandate of advancing both patient and staff engagement and how Fort HealthCare successfully achieved its engagement goals through automation.
Five key insights:
1.) Despite massive technology investments, progress toward hospital and health system priorities is stalling. U.S. healthcare systems lag in experience and outcomes and remain inefficient. Priorities include superior outcomes, better experiences and improved operational and cost efficiencies. The reality is that significant enterprise-wide investments are not delivering expected returns. "We've talked for years about the triple aim of experience, outcomes and cost," Dr. Alagappan said. "Yet, we find that many in the industry are still not moving far or fast enough."
2.) Manual workflows are holding back the healthcare industry. Manual workflows require more administrative support, putting healthcare systems at risk against competition. Most organizations are still hampered by paper forms, repetitive data and phone calls. These manual processes are reflected in the growing number of administrative staff required. "While physician growth in the U.S. over the last 40 years has been almost stagnant, administrative growth has increased linearly," Dr. Alagappan said. This trend makes traditional health systems vulnerable to non-traditional competition. "Almost all leading health systems consider payers and companies like CVS or Amazon to be a significant threat," he said.
3.) Patient and employee engagement are intertwined. An increase in employee engagement is related to an increase in patient experience, which is associated with an increase in profit margin. The opposite is also true, as a negative employee experience gets in the way of delivering a positive patient experience. "Providers say the time they spend charting gets in the way of patient care," Dr. Selvick said. "That obviously translates to [poorer] patient experience."
4.) Notable Health solves these problems through intelligent automation. According to Dr. Alagappan, bots can be trained to perform workflows with levels of intelligence that allow them to complete administrative work on their own. "The bots can do this with speed and agility, often faster than humans," he said. "They [bots] can work 24 hours a day and can be elastically scaled."
5.) Intelligent automation throughout the patient continuum increases both engagement and satisfaction of consumers and employees. Dr. Selvick explained that at Fort HealthCare, the organization started its intelligent automation journey by focusing on prior authorizations. "Now, as we're doing care gap outreach, the patient clicks once during registration, which prompts that module to submit to insurance. Notable works dynamically across the patient care continuum." As a result, 91 percent of authorizations have been successful, and at the same time, patient satisfaction has reached 91 percent. Other workflow automations have followed. "We want to digitize the entire front end of the patient experience," he continued. "We believe that by engaging our staff and moving them to the top of their license, it will promote loyalty from our patients."
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