How to Improve Patient Experience with Healthcare Automation

Automation is expanding to multiple fields and changing the rules of the game to many industries. But, what exactly is automation? It can be defined as the use of different technologies to predetermine and facilitate processes that humans previously did, so they can focus on establishing strategic criteria to guide decision making, relationship matters, and subprocess actions.

Businesses worldwide can leverage their performance, reduce costs, and increase efficiencies by implementing automated processes, especially in the healthcare industry. For example, medical automation can now help providers monitor safety, security, and the health status of patients from anywhere.

This blog post will dig into this subject and explain how healthcare service providers can improve their patients´ experience by implementing automated healthcare systems.

How Does Automation Help Healthcare Systems?

First of all, it’s essential to consider that the healthcare industry is among the top sectors that suffer from the “Great Resignation.” Nowadays, workers no longer stand being burnout by their bosses and decide to stand against them to feel appreciated, valued, and empowered in their workplace.

Indeed, during the pandemic, this has accelerated significantly, and the number of employees who have resigned is incredible. But, what about the high demand that the medical industry developed driven by the Covid-19? Workers desperately need support and certainly have no extra time to deal with more administrative issues. Here is when healthcare automation solutions steps in.

Automation can help healthcare providers keep pace with their demands, save time, and increase productivity as they can focus all their attention on the core of their business: the patients’ health.

Also, manual processes lead to human errors, and in healthcare, these errors can be crucial to the patient´s procedure. Thus, working with automated health systems that reduce these mistakes can significantly favor patients´ safety.

In third place, with automation technology, healthcare providers can expect faster data retrieval, improved ordering, and quicker billing so that their services can increase their performance and assure the best quality possible.

5 Ways Healthcare Automation Improves Patient Experience

Given the high demand for healthcare providers worldwide and the constant need for support in their daily operations, they need to optimize time as much as possible without ever compromising the quality of their services.

As a matter of fact, the Internet of Healthcare Report affirms that "91% of healthcare professionals agree that fixing the burden of time-intensive, manual administrative processes is the most important thing they can do to improve the quality of patient care".

Hence, they just need to be able to focus on their skills and specialty to add significant value to each patient, and the rest is just extra, time-consuming, but necessary.

So, how can they solve this? By implementing healthcare automation solutions! To understand better how exactly it improves patients' experience, here are some examples.

Automation Will Improve Health Access for Many Patients

Nowadays, considering that patients' mobility has been highly compromised due to Covid-19, the demand for health providers has increased. It is more important than ever to count on alternative solutions that allow professionals to have access to their patients still.

Even if it's not because of Covid-19 patients, many people are not medically fit enough to personally visit the hospital, such as the elderly and those with chronic care needs. Therefore, counting on telehealth and automated healthcare solutions will solve these issues and help provide health access to all patients without traveling.

Automation Can Improve The Headache of Appointment Scheduling and Management

As mentioned previously, healthcare providers in America struggle with scheduling and managing appointments as they consume too much time that could be used to see more patients and increase their performance.

On top of that, there is the existing problem that patients often tend to forget they had appointments as they are not always notified beforehand. Hence, they end up missing them, doctors lose their time, and those who couldn't schedule an appointment with the overbooked doctor are being equally disfavoured. So, if healthcare systems work with automated solutions, all of these can be quickly solved.

Likewise, the extensive waiting hours that patients are subjected to when scheduling appointments with their healthcare provider is another significant problem to consider.  Imagine a patient where time can truly define what his future could look like; there is no time to spare, and dealing with administrative matters can not be an excuse.

Also, considering that we live in a world where time is the most valuable asset for everyone and people are no longer negotiating efficiently, the hospital and the healthcare system must meet such standards and improve their performance, or they'll lose clients. So, once again, automation can offer quick and easy-to-use solutions that favor both patients and healthcare providers.

Specifically, some healthcare automation software features related to appointment management are scheduling, booking, canceling consultations, sending appointment reminders via email, SMS, or notifications, and extensive reporting to reduce cancellations and reminders.

So, as you can see, accessibility is increased, time is saved and better used, communication is improved, patient engagement is leveraged, and flexibility is developed.

Automation Allows for Better Communication Between Patients and Providers

Following the previous idea, it's important to highlight how communication between patients and providers is favored by automation. As a matter of fact, adequately done contact motivates patients to undertake their medicine and comply with the treatment fully, whereas; poor communication between patients and physicians leads to low patient outcomes and affects the revenue cycle.

So, both ends must take advantage of telehealth and automation in healthcare to assure better communication flows and reach better results.

Furthermore, we know that in the healthcare industry, quality is not negotiable as patients only expect the best from every health provider. Therefore, we can understand the importance of automation patient monitoring and telehealth solutions as they assure patients worldwide better access to quality care and facilitate improved patient-physician interaction.

Medical Claims are Processed Faster and More Efficiently with Healthcare Automation

In addition to all of these, medical claims are also an important issue to address when offering healthcare services. Still, these tend to be slowly processed in the healthcare systems and result in neglect or misplace important information.

Therefore, this time-consuming and inefficient manual paperwork can be easily eliminated with automation so that errors can consequently be minimized and each patient's claims become easier to address.

When Integrated with EHR, Automated Health Systems Will Increase Hospital Revenue

Last but not least, using electronic health records (EHR) in healthcare will also favor the providers' performance significantly. But, you might be wondering what are EHR exactly?

Well, these are the patient's medical history presented in a digital version so that the data can have real-time updates and be always available for users to consult. These EHRs are patient-centered, assure a high level of security, and favor communication and collaboration between patients and providers of this medical industry. In this way, integrating EHR with automated health systems will allow healthcare providers to have quickly and more efficient access to patient records, share across multiple systems, and communicate to discuss cases and make decisions for their patients.

Besides, it's crucial to bear in mind that healthcare automation software solutions certainly increase hospital revenue. They allow saving all tests into a single system and avoid revenue loss caused by unbilled tests.

Automated Health Services are the Future: Are You Ready?

To sum up, there is no doubt that technological advances, such as automation, have leveraged the medical industry and favored patients and medical providers in various ways.

Having so much that medical providers can work on to benefit society, given the high demand developing in America, there is no need for them to lose time managing administrative and manual paperwork when technology can do that and even reduce errors! It can even be considered necessary to incorporate automation in the day-to-day operations to meet the patient's expectations, increase performance and assure the best quality and patient support.

So, medical providers who want to find the best way to take advantage of all of these and assure great results in their automated health systems should definitely work with healthcare software development services.

Working together with software developers that truly understand the medical industry will ensure excellent products and create customized automated healthcare systems to improve both the patient and provider experience.