The advantages of automating patients healthcare delivery

Healthcare is among the industries that have changed drastically in recent years. One of the biggest changes is the transition from paper-based to digital engagement (personal medical records, online visits, etc). 65% of health care providers confirm that new technologies support their work, 80% of patients still are choosing to attend doctors’ appointments online. In general, the digital health market is expected to reach almost 660 billion dollars by 2025.

What was the reason for such a transformation? Firstly, it is one of the outcomes of pandemics, secondly, tech-savvy patients demand to receive medical services in the most convenient way (including digital engagement).

The driving force of the healthcare industry is the development of smart systems that have changed the way people interact with services and the industry in general. Now, let’s discover how healthcare is benefiting from automation?

What is Healthcare Automation?

Before jumping into the advantages of automation, let’s define what this term means in the healthcare industry. First of all, it’s a great tool that ensures seamless operation, provides constant monitoring and real-time alerts, etc. Automation can include EHR/ERM, mobile devices, IoT devices, and hospital information systems, robotic process automation (RPA). It may be used in health analytics, patients engagement, medical billing, standardized and repeatable tasks (e.g. monitoring) management, self-service tools used by patients, etc. As the result, it leads to improved quality of medical services, increased predictability, data-driven insights, and so on.

The benefits of automation in the healthcare system

Access to information

Data generation is an important part of healthcare as it supports doctors to provide better care. The use of EHR systems helps to generate data quickly in real-time. In addition, not only do doctors have an access to patient’s data on their smartphones which keeps them informed about the patient’s condition. This information is available for all medical institutions no matter whether you decide to change facility or visit another expert.

Data management

As we mentioned above, medical institutions operate and manually manage large amounts of patient data. Automation helps to store and share patient records in a secure and convenient way. Moreover, the usage of big data and analytics in healthcare delivery helps to receive valuable insights, detect any changes or even avoid disease outbreaks.

AI in healthcare

Alongside Big Data, Artificial intelligence analyzes information and simplifies different processes. Also, AI can help doctors diagnose more accurately, predict cardiac events better than medical experts, recognize and separate forms of cancer from harmless growth. Another advantage of the appliance of AI in healthcare is the recognition of potential cancer in radiology images that can’t be detected by the human eye.

Appointment management

Appointments management can be confusing for both, patients who have to deal with other daily tasks and doctors that have hundreds of appointments per day. Smart systems remind patients in advance about the visit, save time, give the opportunity to check doctor’s office hours, and prevent missed consultations.

Cost reduction

Implementing automatization in a medical institution increases operational control and cuts down the labour and financial resources.

Chronic disease monitoring

In our opinion, this aspect is critical in the healthcare industry and can save lives. For instance, by inputting personal health information regularly, people with a chronic disease can be monitored by doctors. It is a time-saving and important way to maintain health conditions.

Predicted Diagnoses

Another reason to consider automation is its ability to detect diseases at early stages and provide exact predictions about the effect of specific treatments. For example, by using an algorithmic approach, AI can make valuable decisions and predictions that will be improved with experience.

Quality and Consistency

Medical errors, fatal mistakes, complications are significantly reduced with automation. One of the reasons is because doctors have all the necessary information not only during treatment but also during possible surgery. Moreover, the quality of delivery increases as automation lets healthcare workers handle a larger amount of patients.

Predicting outcomes

The last but not least reason to incorporate automation is its ability to predict outcomes of illnesses or even viruses. With help of AI that monitors and analyzes different cases, so doctors can create standardized care paths to make the treatment process a little bit easier and to avoid possible changes.

To sum up

There is a lot of potential for development in the healthcare industry. Automation can be a great tool not only for medical experts and institutions to make better decisions, correct diagnoses, accurate predictions, and manage all of it at the same time. Implementing process automation allows healthcare experts to focus on improving patient outcomes and not daily routine. But also it let patient receive treatment in the most convenient way (whether it doctor’s appointments or self-service through the application). With the proven effects on saving time, effort, and cutting down costs, we can hope that it will change the industry in a revolutionary way. With such a quick development of different technologies and software systems, we can’t return to the healthcare delivery how it used to be. At least not after what we’ve experienced during recent years.