When a patient visits the doctor’s office, their experience with their doctor is just as important as their experience with front-office staff, the billing department, or any other hospital department. This holistic experience for the patient is only possible if hospitals automate their back office just as much as they equip themselves with the most up-to-date machines, scanners, and imaging devices on the clinical side that the patient sees.
Why Automation
The administrative costs of healthcare in the United States are higher than any other comparative nation with more than 30% of healthcare expenditures attributed to administrative costs.
Instead of having employees scramble behind all the paperwork, healthcare facilities can get in front of the paperwork as well as improve the quality and speed of work by streamlining their back-office processes of compiling and storing medical records, scheduling staff and patients, processing claims, billing, and more.
Not only will the patient potentially see a decrease in lag-time, healthcare facilities will experience an increase in performance and reduced costs, and employees will benefit from less paper-work, performing less mundane and more meaningful tasks, and more satisfying interactions with patients.
In their future of work report, Deloitte, identified four areas, all back-office processes, in the healthcare system where using technology has the most potential:
- Finance and accounting;
- Human resources/talent recruitment;
- Revenue cycle; and
- Customer service and claims processing.
They found that automating these processes could free up staff to spend more time on patient interactions as well as one hospital that cut its long lag time in the patient billing cycle from 30 days to just three.
Further, the report emphasizes that healthcare organizations risk falling behind if they do not move strategically and diligently towards the future of work which is automation.
Increase Value and Reduce Pain Points
Automating all systems within a healthcare organization can seem daunting and arduous at first, however, with research into the best system and a plan for implementation, the reality of automating won’t be the burden it seems to be.
Right now, healthcare organizations are holding on to outdated systems of operations for their back office without realizing that they are on a familiar path to failure instead of striving to be on an unfamiliar path to success that maximizes care and minimizes error.
