How to Boost Employee Efficiency with Automation

November 22, 2016

Category: News

The continuing revolution of healthcare delivery and reimbursement models places manifold challenges on providers. For organizations of all sizes, automation has become a do-or-die proposition. Like birthing babies, the transition from labor-heavy analog processes to sleek digital systemization can mean suffering some amount of pain, but the anticipated results make the change worthwhile.

Once implemented as routine, automation stands to boost employee efficiency to the point where staff can spend more time focusing on patient care and far less on standardized tasks and paperwork. Bloated HR, billing and collections departments will find themselves more organized, less wasteful of time and paperwork and more accurate all around. A small sampling of further benefits to be expected when partnering with a Software as a Service (SaaS) developer includes the following.

Administrative Consolidation

Depending on the nature of the services, intake procedures can be automated so that the patients check themselves in and deliver their information digitally, rather than on paper forms. Intake information automatically sets up, or adds to, the internal file which also initiates the reimbursement process, eliminating redundancy and manual data entry. This system alone, overlapping with clinical services and HR, enables your business to:

Reduce operating costs and do more with a smaller staff.
Automate appointment reminders.
Integrate services provided with electronic medical records and billing.
Collect and organize data for metrics and analysis.
Deliver requested patient files instantly.
Integrate billing, collections and payer systems.

[WHITE PAPER] Make administrative tasks more productive

Save Time in Clinical Patient Contact

Patient care, the heart of the business, depends on timely attention from your skilled staff. Automation can:

Enable first-contact staff to help patients with non-clinical tasks and needs.
Permit the actual high-salary providers of care to focus on clinical delivery rather than paperwork and administrative tasks.
Improve quality and consistency in record-keeping and retrieval, leading to fewer, potentially fatal, mistakes.
Help track patient compliance with prescriptive care plans.
Reduce hospital readmissions.

Streamline Human Resources

HR departments perhaps stand to gain the most from the initial phase of automation. The ongoing flow of employee paperwork requires staffing larger than needed in this digitalized world. Automation software allows HR managers to:

Merge talent searches into the onboarding process.
Coordinate benefits, salaries, continuing education requirements and offboarding.
Keep on top of periodic tasks with alerts.
Integrate and manage timekeeping and payroll functions with regulatory changes.
Keep records centralized, organized and available to multiple staff members without constant paper duplication.
Manage compliance regulations.
Manage employee inquiries with personalized access.
Utilize the cloud for data security and backup.

[DOWNLOAD] Why automation means more productivity

Procurement

For supply procurement departments and those healthcare businesses centered around home care and medical equipment, automation solves many vexing problems:

Tracking inventory, ordering, shipping and receiving.
Managing equipment use and destinations in real time.
Tracking service results as proof of quality for hospital referral partners, thereby gaining and maintaining confidence.
Enable easier CMS compliance processes.

Although much of the business of healthcare occurs at a distance from direct patient contact, every part must contribute to quality patient experiences. Anything less erodes competitiveness in the marketplace. At the dawn of information technology, financial managers enjoyed the temporary luxury of considering SaaS to be optional; a nice idea, but too expensive for the bottom line. Now, however, with the capacity for automating labor-intensive, complex tasks and reducing overall operating costs, SaaS must be recognized as a necessity.

The day comes when all administrative connections between patients, providers and payers will be electronic and standardized into one interoperable format. Anyone anywhere in the long business chain of healthcare delivery will either have the capacity to participate or will wither away, overshadowed by the leaner, connected competitors that take full advantage of SaaS.