The Australian healthcare and aged care industry has benefitted greatly from automation. With results ranging from a 25% decrease in time spent on scheduling to a 40% increase in productivity, healthcare automation is the future. These impressive gains were made by introducing software to automate tasks once performed by people. Once these repetitive tasks were automated, healthcare professionals were then able to devote more time and energy to improving patient experience.
How can Business Process Automation Help Health and Aged Care?
Business process automation (BPA) is a technology-driven approach for reducing and eliminating repetitive tasks and processes. BPA helps streamline the workflow for healthcare and aged care organisations by automating administrative tasks, reducing human errors, and improving patient experiences.
For example, BPA can be used to automate data entry and scheduling tasks. You can also use it for tasks like inventory management and staff scheduling. BPA can even help with improving healthcare decision-making by analysing data for healthcare professionals.
The benefits of BPA include reduced operating costs, better regulatory compliance and improved workflow. The result of these benefits is that Australian healthcare and aged care professionals will have more time and energy to improve the quality of health services they deliver.
Tasks that can be automated in the Healthcare Industry
These four tasks are the best candidates for business process automation.
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Appointment scheduling
Appointment scheduling involves coordinating patient appointments with healthcare providers. Conventional appointment scheduling is a time-consuming manual process that administrative staff perform on paper calendars or spreadsheets. Modern healthcare organisations can automate this activity by using automatic scheduling apps and other software tools. These automatic scheduling apps offer the following advantages.
Automated appointment scheduling systems provide increased convenience for both patients and administrative staff. Patients are able to schedule appointments by logging into online portals from their phones and selecting an appropriate date. These systems also ensure patients don’t miss appointments and experience improved satisfaction. Also, since patients directly enter their data into the scheduling systems instead of administrative staff taking notes, there’s a reduced chance of human error.
Healthcare organisations can even directly integrate appointment scheduling systems with their electronic medical records (EMRs) to automatically store data.
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Managing Medical Record
Medical record management involves storing, retrieving, and maintaining patients’ health information. Modern healthcare organisations have transitioned from paper–based records to electronic medical records (EMR), which has vastly improved the security and accessibility of patient data.
The advantages of EMR include more convenient access to patient data, improved data accuracy, and enhanced data sharing among healthcare providers. The most advanced EMRs even provide advanced tools like AI-based decision-making and analysis.
EMR also improves data security. You can integrate data backup, recovery systems, and health information exchange (HIE) networks. Doing so ensures the safety and security of sensitive patient data. Healthcare providers can also use EMR for adhering to strict privacy and security regulations.
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Prescription management
Prescription management is the creation, processing, and distribution of patient prescriptions. Prescription management software can be used to automate this activity. Automation greatly improves the prescription management process by reducing workloads and improving patient safety and outcomes. Electronic prescribing (e-prescribing) systems are a popular automation tool that lets healthcare providers directly generate and send prescriptions to pharmacies.
These systems also ensure that patients receive the correct medication at the appropriate frequency and dose. You can use these systems for research by testing for potential drug interactions. This can be easily achieved by integrating your automated prescription management systems with electronic medical records (EMRs), allowing you to access their medical information in real-time.
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Remote patient monitoring
Remote patient monitoring is a new monitoring approach that involves collecting patients’ health data from their homes and other remote locations. This data is then given to healthcare providers for analysis. Remote patient monitoring has become increasingly popular because it lets medical professionals continuously monitor patients without needing in-person visits. Remote patient monitoring systems are usually smart wearable devices that measure health indicators like heart rate, oxygen saturation, and blood pressure.
Early detection of these potential health issues provides opportunities for timely intervention to prevent complications and improve patient health. Additionally, remote patient monitoring provides multiple other benefits to patients and medical institutions, like better convenience and better access to medical care for rural and remote populations.
How Automation is Improving the Health and Aged Care Industry
Automation has transformed the healthcare and aged care industries by improving medical organisations’ efficiency and quality. For example, the ABC aged care organisation employed scheduling software and experienced a 30% reduction in absent appointments, a 15% rise in overall appointments, and a 25% decrease in time spent on scheduling.
Automation also improves patient care by providing faster and more accurate access to patient information. Tools like e-prescribing have all proven to massively improve patient experiences and outcomes. The Australian Health Services Research Institute discovered that automation in healthcare improved productivity by upwards of 40%.
Despite these impressive gains, it must be noted that automation cannot be uniformly applied to all healthcare organisations. Each healthcare and aged care organisation must individually assess which tasks to automate and how. A blank automation policy would likely result in more harm than good. So businesses must carefully implement automation.
In conclusion, business process automation has tremendous potential for Australian health care and aged care organisations. BPA improves how healthcare organisations store and manage patient data and healthcare processes. Evidence from the Australian Health Services Research Institute demonstrates impressive returns from automation.
But automating a healthcare organisation is a complex process. And you need to do it right to benefit from it. You may even need professional help. You can contact PowerbITs for a free consultation to help you set up business process automation for your healthcare organisations.