When it comes to IT efficiency—automation is where it’s at. But historically, healthcare industry has dragged its feet when it comes to embracing technical change. Slowly, the industry is warming to the multitude of benefits automation can provide, and just in time, as demands increase and staffing shortages persist in health organizations across the U.S.
Even if you’re onboard with embracing healthcare automation, hospitals could be overlooking some important areas where it could assist in streamlining processes, saving time and money, and reducing staff frustration, according to Advanced Systems Concepts’ Vice President Jim Manias.
Here are five processes hospitals didn’t know could be automated:
1. Enhance Security and Compliance
With the number of high profile hackings as well as industry and government regulations like HIPPA or HITECH, security and compliance are top concerns for every healthcare organization. Automation solutions with auditing capabilities allow IT to set policies on plans and other workflows that require users to enter authorizations before they can perform various operations.
2. Dynamically Provision Virtual/Cloud Systems
Just as smart thermostat systems raise and lower the temperature according to your activities, an intelligent automation solution can automatically spin up more machines when additional computing power is needed to complete jobs, as well as spin down machines during idle times to eliminate resource waste.
3. Improve Data and Analytics / Big Data
Automation provides a significant advantage to organizations using big data by reliably executing complex workflows needed to process unstructured and structured data. Now that electronic medical records (EMR) are becoming a standard across the United States, there are promising opportunities to analyze this data and gain insights that will improve patient care. Additionally, modern workload automation solutions provide a centralized viewpoint for workflows and processes that give organizations enhanced monitoring of big data dependencies and constraints.
4. Onboard and Offboard Staff & Patients
Organizations can minimize the wait time of adding new patients or staff into their billing and Human Resources systems by creating an automated process as soon as a new sale is made. Similarly, organizations can get employees up and running faster without having to rely on manual processes by using automation to onboard/offboard employees.
5. Automate Help Desk and Support Procedures
Healthcare organizations can utilize the built-in alerting capabilities of automation software to create Help Desk tickets when an object fails, thereby eliminating manual handoffs and reducing the time to resolution.
