Healthcare’s Automation Opportunity
Since the dawn of time humanity has been leveraging our creativity to invent new ways of scaling our work. Whether it is transferring manual labor to gravity to facilitate the transportation of water via the Roman aqueducts. Moving the tactile, manual work of writing individual books to the printing press, creating an explosion of new readers across the globe. Developing the grain mill which used power generated by falling water to grind wheat into flour, allowing us to harvest more crops and feed more people.
Creating production lines and robots to facilitate the automation of new vehicles and many other devices allowing companies to build 24/7.
Or more recently leveraging the use of computers to help improve our everyday lives.
We are always looking to find ways to become more efficient and offload work to a mechanical process, machine, or computer to scale our existing work such that we can pursue more creative endeavors in the world.
The Healthcare Call to Action
It is generally no surprise for people to hear that healthcare is complex, inefficient, or notoriously difficult to navigate. Yet the breadth of this problem is staggering, where inefficiencies can account for over $1 trillion dollars [1]. An opportunity in addressing this is diving into automation where as much as 36% of the work today in healthcare could be automated, representing up to $410 billion in annual cost savings. [2].
Understanding Our Potential Use Cases
When people think of automation or hear things such as artificial intelligence (AI) or robotic process automation (RPA) being used to automate processes, it is easy to think of dystopian science fiction stories such as Terminator where Skynet, an all-knowing computer system, becomes sentient and tries to destroy humanity, or The Matrix where machines enslave humanity to use them as makeshift batteries.
However, that couldn’t be further than the case as automation presents opportunities to remove the “junk” work from healthcare delivery, allowing clinicians to bring more humanity back into their care. While there is much focus on the repetitive, back-end processes often found in the revenue cycle, it is important for us to examine opportunities to improve day-to-day, clinical operations. For example:
Population Health Management
As people forget or miss regular cancer screenings, which dropped as much as 80% during the pandemic [3], teams need to address and reach out to these individuals to ensure they can get the preventative care they need. This can be an administratively heavy experience involving chart reviews, time spent on patient outreach, and then scheduling of these appointments. All of which can involve multiple people from multiple teams.
Rather than relying being entirely reliant on humans, there is ripe opportunity to automate this by having computers review an individual’s history, send out automated messages that they may be due for an appointment, and when appropriate include an ability for that individual to self-schedule their appointment or even an intake call.
Automating Access & Intake
Many times, when an individual presents to clinic, they may need to complete forms ahead of time, provide medical records, or in some cases walk through a lengthy conversation prior to a procedure. This information may then need to be transcribed back into a medical record by a staff member.
In a more modern world, an individual would be able to fill out information ahead of time, populating the medical record, or bring in their materials that could be scanned and read by computers to extract valuable information such as names, identification numbers, and lab readings.
Scaling Triage Capability
As healthcare systems have tried to become more consumer centric by providing mobile messaging applications to address patient concerns asynchronously, or opened live triage lines, they are realizing pent up demand for these services.
To help continue to address this demand and ensure that the right questions get to the right people in an efficient manner healthcare organizations need to think more like retailers.
This could include chatbots that we find on many sites where an individual can walk through a decision tree of questions, where upon answering the right questions, they can be directed to an information page, have an order created with an opportunity to schedule an appointment, or be directed to the right clinician for more information.
Diagnosing and Treatment Recommendations
Clinicians spent a significant amount of time combing through charts and creating documentation around patient visits. For example, family medicine physicians spend so much time documenting after their workday, that the term pajama time has been adopted for this phenomenon [4].
Advancements in natural language processing (NLP) technologies can help to minimize some of this burden. Whether that could include helping to dictate a message and turning into a structured note or combing through previous notes and order history to develop a recommended treatment plan based on the ordering providers history, much like how Amazon may recommend items based on your order history.
Making clinician lives better will be essential in the short-term as workers are burnt out as indicated by polling which shows that we will continue to see a nursing shortage over the next decade [5]; where as much as 23% of the current workforce plans on leaving the industry [6]. Less staff means more creativity will be needed to address growing care needs amongst the population.
What’s Next?
While this is just the tip of the iceberg, healthcare is ripe to continue this digital transformation in part catalyzed by the COVID pandemic. There is too much at stake from a cost, quality, and experience perspective to revert to the prior way of doing things. However, as we continue to embark on this journey, it will be important to keep a high standard around the delivery of safe care and not to cut corners in the way we deliver it. Automating processes and procedures can certainly help free up more time to spend on one-on-one care, yet it should not put the safety and quality of that care at risk.
In future renditions of this article, we will examine the unique technologies that can be utilized to support this digital transformation.
Source List:
[1] https://hbr.org/2015/10/how-the-u-s-can-reduce-waste-in-health-care-spending-by-1-trillion
[3] https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p0630-cancer-screenings.html
[5] Haddad LM, Annamaraju P, Toney-Butler TJ. Nursing Shortage. [Updated 2022 Feb 22]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2022 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK493175/
