Maintaining communication between healthcare providers and patients only points to better therapeutic outcomes in both short-term and long-term clinical scenarios. However, many challenges lie in achieving a smooth, seamless transmission of vital information in a timely manner. What’s good is that these challenges can be directly addressed by technology-driven solutions, one of the most notable in delivering concrete positive impacts is BPA in Healthcare.
Indeed, business process automation in healthcare has arguably been one of the more successful marriages in recent years. Why? Most of it stems from the ability of these technology-based methods in optimizing the overall workflow. In patient communication, for example, it’s actually proven to be capable of significantly boosting the follow-up visitations by patients.
How Business Process Automation Can Boost Patient Communication Workflow
An evidence-based trial conducted in the Michigan Federally Qualified Health Center revealed that automated telephone communication can improve screening follow-up visits from patients by as much as 33%. It’s safe to say that the initiative achieved its main goal of improving screening follow-ups, which, in the end, only saves a lot of lives through active preventative measures.
And what exactly was the factor that led to such a boost? The vast improvements occurred after the introduction of technology-driven automated phone calls, mainly due to the sheer timeliness and velocity in which the calls were made to the respective patients. Had it been done manually, it would have led to delays or would have required numerous communication staff.
Those completed appointments all obviously translate to an increase in revenue for the said health center. Of course, that’s just one scenario. In these times when the looming shadow of the pandemic hounds every healthcare system, it’s only appropriate for institutions to be vigilant and consider every viable, better solution to keep operations running smoothly and optimally.
Other Effective Ways BPA in Healthcare Can Improve Communication Between Doctors and Patients
These are but some of the other notable methods in which automation can markedly boost the patient communication workflows, leading to no less than unprecedented boosts in productivity and freeing up more time for caregivers to fulfill more crucial therapeutic services.
Making accurate, vital data more readily accessible to doctors.
The time it takes for data to be extracted and entered manually has usually led to vast delays in communication between doctors and patients. Even a delay of a few days can already mean the difference between saving a life or a patient deciding to push through with a screening follow-up.
Intelligent process automation can greatly decrease the amount of time that data entry and extraction can be done while being able to guarantee zero error in the process. The sooner doctors get the verified patient data they need, the faster they’ll be able to relay this to the latter. Is it any wonder then that automation solutions have been lauded for not only boosting operational efficiency, increasing productivity, and providing a more satisfactory experience for patients?
Boosts patients’ engagement that in turn leads to timely payments.
Other automation solutions delivered automated registration links and oriented patients with information through online mediums like automated emails. Some also send regular automated reminders through text messages, emails, or phone calls with set frequencies. A few even go to the limit in automatically providing photos and instructions on how to get to their respective clinics and health centers, which only reduce patients’ stress.
Most of these activities would have required massive amounts of effort for them to be sent in record-time velocities and frequencies. In the end, the automated solutions only vastly improved the feedback from most patients, to the point that they made more timely payments. For hospitals struggling with high patient debt, this is nothing short of a valuable boon.
In the end, most of these benefits only mean massive cost reductions for any kind of healthcare institution. These reductions, of course, directly aid in increasing revenue for clinics, hospitals, and other relevant, licensed groups that operate in the healthcare industry.
The optimized workflow also leads to operational efficiency and productivity precisely because it also readily correlates to a motivated staff. And what could be more conducive to any institution’s success than healthcare staff that is no longer burdened? What could be more empowering and liberating than no longer being required to perform repetitive, but no less important tasks?
Conclusion
In a future where telemedicine is at the forefront, it’s only logical for healthcare institutions to start familiarizing and capitalizing on the immense benefits of intelligent process automation in healthcare. With the way trends are looking and the pandemic factor, it’s safe to say that the healthcare industry worldwide is headed in that direction.
The fact that these desirable outcomes have a common denominator in time-saving and decreased costs only underlines the indispensability of BPA in healthcare. The positive results it has brought forth speak for themselves, and the most promising notion is that technology is only bound to become more sophisticated over time.
