By Swarnali Adhya
4th October, 2021
The pandemic has changed how people around the world live, work, and engage with each other. In late 2019 when covid-19 struck the world, affecting millions of people all over the planet — the healthcare industry was hit the most. The pressing need for resources, information, cost optimization, and supply chain inefficiencies in the sector calls for a major technology overhaul. Therefore, embracing new-age digital technologies is key for healthcare providers in addressing the immediate concerns and driving long-term goals.
Automation makes a revolutionary process change in most of the industries, that has the same or even more potential for the healthcare sector. Introduction of Business Process automation can streamline the healthcare system for simplicity, increase service quality, and manage pen and paper-based manual tasks, saving time and cost without the slightest glitch.
Challenges in Healthcare
Application Disparity: Modern healthcare is a complex environment where many disparate applications work. The complexities also grow with the business. With mergers and acquisitions, modern technologies are adopted to meet new challenges. In this situation managing all technology becomes quite difficult for the healthcare IT departments and business users.
For example, in most healthcare sectors, patient data transfer is still carried out manually in the form of files and documents from one department to another. As the volumes of data are generally high, compiling them in one single process is a tedious and lengthy process. Not to forget, since they are done manually, there is always scope for multiple human errors and miscalculations. The greater the rate of error, the more the cost will be for rectification.
Lack of efficiency in patient service is another challenge that can be a barrier to your organization’s growth and reputation. In most scenarios, customer care executives are busy with paper works and other files and documents compilation that they lack prompt and timely delivery of services to the customers.
I hope you can relate to the problems I discussed above. So now I am going to share how automation becomes an integral part to solve some of healthcare challenges.
The business automation software works on all programs whether, new applications, legacy programs, cloud-based solutions, or on-prem.
BPA makes human-oriented processes much smoother with greater results like increased speed, productivity, and efficiency. Suppose for a patient, scheduling an appointment with a doctor usually happens online in a matter of minutes, but what happens behind the scenes is a bit more complicated. Healthcare institutions have to collect personal information, diagnosis, insurance details, and confirm the doctor’s availability. If the right information cannot be accessed during the registration process, or if the doctor is not available, it is up to the staff to inform the patient beforehand.
Implementing automation can resolve some of the bottlenecks related to scheduling patient appointments. Bots can automate patient data collection and processing, so patients can be optimally scheduled according to diagnosis, location, doctor availability, and other criteria. By simplifying appointment scheduling, healthcare institutions can focus their efforts on providing exceptional service and other tasks that cannot be automated. Automation tools also enable customer care executives to take the assistance of such tools with automated call and email options.
Inovar proposed Automation Solutions with better ROI
Something similar also happened with one of our US healthcare clients. They were also facing customer support challenges during the pandemic. They were primarily using a pen and paper-based system for information collection and symptom analysis. After the outbreak of the virus, a lot of patients started asking for support in their chatbot regarding diagnosis, vaccination, and other medical support.
With a lot of restrictions, it becomes necessary to give patients the capability to run the assessments on their own from the comfort of their homes. Remote work capability also became especially important, and they needed an infrastructure through which they can achieve that.
To manage the entire scenario, they required VPN, which was not designed for such large-scale use resulting in low bandwidth and frequent outages. Additionally, a lot of the content and manual workflows required the physical presence of the employees on the hospital premises that was quite impossible at that moment.
In this critical situation, the first hurdle to cross was to get them to a cloud-based solution to ride care facilities across all their nation-level operations and provide the best health support to patients. This would make remote work possible for the hospital staff in case they were showing symptoms and had to quarantine at home.
In this situation, Inovar helped a leading US healthcare organization to automate their Covid-19 Helpdesk and Registration process from a pen and paper-based manual system to a cloud-based automated solution.
SharePoint Online became the choice of the platform along with Power Platform as their primary productivity technologies allowed them to create a technology framework with a built-in rapid growth mechanism and assist hospital staff to manage the entire remote work process.
With the implementation of the initial solution, the healthcare organization was also facing challenges to roll out the solution in all other locations of the US that becomes much fair with SharePoint and the power platform.
A simple but practical experience gained a high adoption rate within the healthcare organization. The organization’s IT team also considered it as the best rollout experience with almost a zero-touch provisioning and deployment strategy. Ultimately, with all these solutions 90% of their remote and quarantined caregivers were able to serve the patients over remote calls and Online consultation.
The digitization of call centers was a major bonus as it consisted of Automated Diagnosis for Covid, automatic decision-making capabilities, and other similar tools that ensured self-help services that were non-existent before. This resulted in a reduction of 70% in phone calls.
Businesses transitioning from manual processes to comprehensive workload automation tend to go through several phases on their automation journey. If you are also facing the same difficulties within your organization, then Inovar is the best partner to collaborate with and make your automation journey smoother. Feel free to reach out to us we would love to collaborate!
