More than clinical work, providers are buried in administrative tasks, so much so that they spend 14% more time year-over-year on administrative processes. The implications? Medical staff are experiencing burnout, operating costs are rising, and organizations are facing the wrath of regulators. The healthcare industry should take a leaf from the books of other industries, like Retail and Banking, and adopt low-code automation to gain immunity from the prevalent challenges and provide value-based care.
Straining administrative processes in healthcare
Over decades, medical inventions brought more treatments and specialties. Regulations have become stricter and required organizations to securely maintain detailed health records. Insurance systems evolved and claims processes have become more complex. All these factors contributed to an increase in administrative workload. From scheduling a patient’s appointment to the insurer paying the provider, the typical administrative workflow contains multiple processes that consume extensive human capital and time.
Did you know?
Between 1975 and 2010, the number of physicians grew by 150%, whereas the number of admin staff ballooned by 3200%. (Source: Harvard)
Increased stress
Despite a massive growth in jobs, organizations are still understaffed to keep up with the admin tasks due to changing compliance requirements and increased scrutiny. According to World Health Organization (WHO), the threat of workforce crisis in the healthcare sector is here and now. The international organization reported that there is a shortage of 1.8 million workers in the European Union alone. (Source: Healthcare Digital) Employees are pressed for time and experiencing burnout at an alarming level.
Rising costs
The Commonwealth Fund estimated where America is spending its healthcare budget. It didn’t come as a surprise to see that administrative processes alone cost 30% of the total expenditure, whereas less than 5% was spent on medical machinery and equipment. (Source: Commonwealth Fund)
The rising operating costs are making access to care dearer for people. PwC’s latest study on annual medical costs estimated healthcare costs to hit 13-year high in 2025.
Costly errors
Due to the manual processes, human errors in administrative and clinical tasks has become common in the healthcare sector. The medical errors, such as incorrect patient information, scheduling errors, billing errors, etc., have serious consequences. The magnitude? NIH reports that medical errors harmed over 400,000 patients and costed the healthcare system $20 billion annually. Besides, physicians are facing serious psychological effects, such as anger, depression, etc., that could directly impact patient care. (Source: NIH)
A shot in the arm with low-code process automation
Providers need to give agility to their operations and boost resilience to face unpredictable challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic. But the manual processes are crippling the operations and jeopardizing the entire system. Organizations should rethink their operational strategies and adopt automation technologies to drive consistent growth while delivering value-based care.
Data privacy and compliance challenges and high IT costs were the primary reasons impeding technology adoption in the healthcare industry. But the times have changed. With the advent of low-code solutions and robust security frameworks, process automation has become more affordable, scalable, efficient, and secure.
Medical staff spend on average 41% of their time on unproductive tasks. These tasks can be automated using low-code process automation to free up physicians and nurses from the drudgery, allowing them to focus on direct patient care or take much-required breaks to destress.
Let’s look at prior authorization. In the manual approach, providers submit the request form with patient details and medical information along with supporting documents, such as lab reports. The submission happens over email or fax. The insurance staff manually uploads these details into their system, reviews the details, and runs through approvals. However, this verification process is highly cumbersome and time-consuming. Providers should follow up with the insurance team to know the status of these requests. If the requests got rejected, the provider will need to repeat the process.
Now, let’s reimagine the scenario with automated workflows in place. The provider will not have to manually enter any details. They create digital forms that automatically extract data from patient records. They can scan documents using OCR technology or upload digital files to the system directly. Through automated workflows, all the data would reach the insurance company’s systems securely. Providers can check the status in real time using a dashboard. The automation system will send timely alerts and reminders to the concerned parties to ensure adherence to timelines. Providers will be notified of the approver’s action on the requests.
With automation, you will not have to perform redundant data entry tasks and eliminate human errors. You can reduce the wait time for the insurance company to receive documents to almost zero minutes. Your team won’t have to keep following up to check the status. With streamlined approval processes, the automation solution will eliminate approval delays and expedite processes. Your staff can save hours of their time and focus on direct patient care.
What is low-code automation?
Low-code automation is a visual approach that helps you build automated workflows without requiring much coding knowledge. You can combine technologies like AI/ML, computer vision, RPA, etc. to streamline routine or non-routine processes with minimal or no human intervention.
In his visual approach includes business users, admin staff in this context, in the development process to ensure more user-friendly, streamlined workflows. The visual approach enables business users to create or customize workflows without requiring much help from the IT teams. With quick turnaround time and easy maintenance, low-code automation offers faster and more affordable solutions for healthcare organizations.
Whether you’re a large organization or a small nonprofit, low-code solutions promise the same level of efficiency and security. A North Carolina-based nonprofit residential care provider partnered with Saxon AI, a Microsoft Solutions Partner, to develop a low-code automation solution for streamlining their purchase order processing and repair order processing. With traditional paper-based practices, the organization had little control over the processes. They would either spend more on redundant orders or face a shortage of critical supplies when needed. With Saxon AI’s help, the organization implemented an effective automation solution that transformed the processes forever, creating a significant impact on the care they provide to hundreds of needy in the city. You can read more about the inspiring transformation story here.
Key capabilities to seek in low-code solutions
The key objective of process automation in healthcare is to eliminate the administrative burden on physicians, nurses, and administrators. To serve the intended purposes, a low code automation solution should bring together a set of capabilities to break silos, eliminate manual processes, and automate workflows. Let’s see some of the key capabilities you should look for in a low-code automation solution.
Interoperability
A smooth patient journey requires effective collaboration between different departments and organizations. Interoperability plays an essential role in establishing a seamless flow of data to make the right decisions. To enable interoperability, your low-code process automation solution should break silos and integrate with all the line-of-business (LOB) applications.
Digital checklists
Data entry errors, process inefficiencies, approval delays – paper is the breeding ground for all these challenges in administrative processes. You can replace the paper-based processes with digital checklists built in low-code approach. The benefit? The digital checklists are customizable – you can create and edit checklists without requiring IT help and share with your frontline staff, physicians, supervisors, administrators, etc.
For example, Proceso, our low-code process automation platform, comes with in-built templates – including patient care, shift handover, facility maintenance, infection control protocols, FDA compliance audit checklists, and you name it. You can quickly and easily customize these templates to meet your specific requirements and share digitally with your colleagues.
Unified approvals
Your organization has people responsible for approvals in different capacities to ensure compliance with organizational and regulatory requirements. The challenge with traditional approval practices is that the approval requests come over emails or papers. In the thick of things, missing these approvals is not uncommon. But the delays in approvals can have serious consequences. For example, your Pharmacy Director forgot to approve new medication orders and current stock was over. What would happen when a patient needed the medication urgently?
With a low-code unified approvals solution, approvers can have a complete view of the pending and approved requests coming from different departments. So, they don’t have to switch tabs for approvals. On Proceso, you can create tailored workflows to ensure frictionless approvals and streamlined processes.
AI capabilities
Healthcare processes run on heavy documentation – from patient registration forms to discharge summaries, insurance forms, audit forms, staff schedules, and inventory reports. Manual processes involve writing on paper and entering the data into ERP systems, which are extensively time-consuming and highly error prone. Computer vision helps you automate data extraction and document processing. On Proceso, you can integrate Azure AI services to leverage computer vision and automate document processing.
Automated workflows
With the help of the above-mentioned capabilities, the solution should automatically process, such as preauthorization, claims processing, inventory management, sales order processing, and you name it. With low-code automation, business users can create workflows using a visual approach. Who else can have better context than your business users to create the workflows? To get a flying start, you can seek in-built workflows on the automation solution, which you can customize to meet your requirements.
Looking for a right low-code process automation solution?
Proceso is a comprehensive platform that compacts a large set of cutting-edge capabilities, from digital checklists to AI capabilities and automated workflows. The cloud-based, low-code solutions platform offers great scalability and flexibility to fit into your digital ecosystem and empowers your workforce with agility.
Want to see how Proceso can help your healthcare business?