By Ben Manning, director of product management, ETHERFAX.
Despite significant progress in health information technology (HIT) and artificial intelligence (AI), many healthcare processes remain inefficient. Administrative workflows are cumbersome and error-prone, and they can lead to serious repercussions, including delayed patient care, clinician burnout, and mounting costs.
Generative AI (Gen AI) is a type of artificial intelligence that creates new content—such as text, images, or even insights—by learning from large datasets. In healthcare technology, Gen AI has transformative potential. It can automate tasks like generating medical summaries, assisting with diagnostic image analysis, or even suggesting personalized treatment plans, thereby saving time for healthcare providers and improving accuracy in patient care.
Additionally, Gen AI can streamline administrative tasks and data analysis, helping organizations manage records, optimize workflows, and enhance decision-making. However, realizing this potential requires a deep understanding of existing challenges in healthcare workflows and a strategic approach to integrating automation into day-to-day operations.
The Ripple Effect of Inefficiencies
Inefficiencies in healthcare workflows are not isolated incidents; they affect a wide range of stakeholders, each of whom bears the brunt in different ways.
Clinicians find themselves overwhelmed by administrative tasks such as charting, billing, and data entry. These tasks, though essential, are contributing to clinician burnout—a significant issue in the healthcare industry. Dealing with inefficient workflows is also leading to lower job satisfaction and higher turnover rates among medical professionals.
For administrative staff, inefficient workflows translate into an overwhelming volume of paperwork and repetitive manual tasks. This not only lowers productivity but also increases the likelihood of errors, which can have cascading effects throughout the healthcare system. The repetitiveness of data entry workflows, compounded by often inadequate compensation, makes it difficult to attract and retain qualified administrative staff.
For patients, inefficient workflows can manifest as longer wait times, delayed diagnoses, and poor patient experience. When administrative or clinical processes are bogged down by inefficiency, patients experience frustration and dissatisfaction. Worse, their health outcomes may be negatively affected by delays in receiving necessary care.
Digitizing workflows without automation tools often perpetuates existing inefficiencies. Too often these workflows fail to optimize and streamline administrative processes, limiting the potential benefits of health information technology. The push to digitize workflows often means repeating the same paper process, but in a digital format; which doesn’t make the process more efficient.
Guest post by Dave Willsey, CEO and co-founder, Integrify.
David Willsey
Data security is a top concern of every healthcare provider today. And for good reason. A recent news story from The Wall Street Journal reported that healthcare is “frequently cited as one of the industries most exposed to cyberattack due to large networks with numerous access points and vulnerable, legacy computer systems.”
If there is an industry more vulnerable to hackers today than healthcare organizations, you’d have to search far and wide to find it. Healthcare hacking is a growing problem. It is a trend that will not change course anytime soon.
Unfortunately, hospitals and other providers present a target rich environment for criminals and malicious hackers. And, to make matters worse, a recent study by researchers at three leading universities concluded that additional threats are coming from within “the house” as clinicians and other staff are taking shortcuts and finding workarounds to security measures in an attempt to deliver better patient care.
The federal government response to this growing threat is two-fold: mandatory reporting of data breaches and financial penalties that sting when violations of protected health information occur.
When it comes to reporting and ensuring continuous improvement to guard against future risk to data security, the number-one best practice today is a well-conceived, executable and automated incident response plan (IRP).
The good news is seven-in-ten providers have an IRP in place. The not-so-good-news is most of those plans are based on manual, labor intensive, error-prone processes. What’s needed to step-up the game for healthcare providers is an automated IRP workflow process. Automation is the only way to protect your data as the threat continues to evolve in the future.
Secure data and information is the chief reason to automate IRP workflow. But ROI is another major business driver to invest in automation. Here’s why – you’ll get quick payback from more accurate information about threats and breaches sooner in the process before they get out of hand; your teams will be able to execute with rapid response times that lead to fast resolution when compared to manual processes; and, finally, automation will bring your leadership team and other key stakeholders a unique capability to apply analytics and intelligence to support and measure continuous improvement in critical processes against future threats.
Automated IRP can provide all users with a simple incident reporting tool across the healthcare ecosystem – if a doctor or nurse or someone in the pharmacy formulary, for example, notices a potential security issue, that user can immediately trigger an automated IRP process. This action would notify the front line responder teams who can then escalate a response if needed.
Effective incident response planning addresses three key areas – people, process and data. With people, it’s very important that the roles of each person handling patient data are well identified and this would include all clinical staff, billing and administrative personnel, insurance agents, IT personnel, outside vendors, contractors, and others.
