Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a rising force in today’s tech-driven society. Many believe that AI generation systems and natural language processing tools have the potential to radically enhance the accessibility of information, even within healthcare. While it’s true that healthcare AI will help assist clinicians with burnout and improve care conditions–AI should never replace the human side of care. It should automate it with automated intelligence.
Automation in healthcare consists of technology solutions that help boost communication, efficiency, and the overall productivity of providers. It allows clinicians more time to provide critical care, lowering care costs and ultimately creating a better experience for everyone involved. To bridge the gap between AI and automation, health organizations have turned to automated intelligence to include the crucial aspects of both.
What is Automated Intelligence?
The weight of administrative tasks, regulatory requirements, and staff burnout often strain healthcare budgets and the amount of time clinicians devote to patients. Automated intelligence helps to alleviate these barriers by navigating complex workflow and passing data securely from one system to another.
By combining smart-technology with trained clinical application, intelligent automation can streamline back-office functions like appointment scheduling and reduce highly repetitive or labor-intensive tasks. Providing care is exclusively human, and cannot be replaced by artificial intelligence, but tasks can. Automating everyday practices in healthcare, especially those involving patient health records, data entry, and routine communications, eliminates error, speeds up processing time and helps reduce nurse burnout.
Addressing Burnout
Being a healthcare provider is stressful, and despite most organizations facing staffing challenges, patients are relying on their providers more than ever before. When clinicians can’t provide high-quality care due to excessive stress and burnout, patients ultimately suffer the consequences. Clinician burnout has three main symptoms:
- Exhaustion – a clinician’s physical and emotional energy levels are extremely low.
- Depersonalization – emotional energy is depleted, also known as “compassion fatigue”.
- Lack of Efficacy – doubting the meaning or purpose of your work (NIH).
It’s important to be aware and always address signals of burnout in your staff, however; you cannot reduce burnout without noticing it. A 2022 Physician Sentiment Survey revealed, “91% of respondents say the burden of regulatory requirements is getting worse, [with] 72% [of clinicians] not confident that their organization is set up to minimize the time they spend on administrative tasks so they can focus on patient care”. Luckily, intelligent automation can be used to treat all symptoms of burnout in an organization.
Intelligent Automation for Engagement:
Automation can be a powerful catalyst for engagement–not a replacement. Thanks to advances in technology, automated systems are creating opportunities for clinicians to streamline administrative tasks and devote more time to patients who are engaged in their own care. As intelligent automation streamlines simple tasks like medication refills and measuring vitals, clinicians have more time to commit to their patients. These repetitive activities are managed in real time by technology like connected remote patient monitoring (RPM) and automated interactive phone calls, surveys, and education that help patients take more charge of their conditions. This engagement helps providers magnify their care efforts and boost outcomes.
Automation also supports cost-effective staff deployment. Patient health and communications data, collected and reported automatically, helps providers reduce care bottlenecks and even anticipate and prevent care disruptions, like when a patient runs out of medication on a weekend. Analytics technology also accurately prioritizes and assigns tasks based on which patient needs it most and who is on-call, with a patient, or off-duty. As a result, your staff can take time to recharge without worrying about their patients after hours. And when a patient calls with an urgent need, automated portals quickly direct them to the best care provider for their situation. (HealthIT).
Maintaining Personalization:
The clinician workload is a heavy one. According to the NIH, “physicians spend more than twice as much time in the physician work room, than the time they spend with all their patients combined.” From calling patients to remind them about their appointments to making consistent and accurate patient rounds–it can be difficult to make sure tasks run smoothly without sacrificing the patient experience.
Intelligent automation creates a personalized care experience for your patients by uncovering patient insights and informing clinician decision making. One key example of this is RPM platforms alerting healthcare providers to intervene earlier if a patient is at a higher risk for certain conditions, saving costs and time down the line.
Automated interactions and alerts can assure patients their clinicians aren’t too busy, reducing the likelihood they might receive better care somewhere else. Improved patient satisfaction boosts quality scores, loyalty, and is critical to the long-term satisfaction of your organization. With this kind of patient engagement interwoven into your intelligent automation, it can produce high-quality and sustainable care for everyone (BusinessWire).
A Few Benefits of Intelligent Automation:
- Improved ability to deliver quality patient care while managing costs.
- Empowered healthcare workers with higher retention rates and job satisfaction.
- Increased data accuracy compared to error-prone manual processes
- Higher levels of compliance in workflow, completed efficiently and without error.
- Consistency and flexibility across interactions over time.
Ready to Integrate Automated Intelligence Today? Choose CareXM.
Even with constant technology and regulatory changes, healthcare will continue to face many challenges providing quality care. Burnout and human error are some of the biggest barriers hospice, home health, and other providers face. Embracing intelligent automation remains a key strategy for better efficiency today and in the future, as the number of aging patients grows.
CareXM is the kind of experienced clinical partner you can count on to deliver the help you need to elevate your patient and caregiver experiences. Our mission is to help our partners effortlessly anticipate and respond to patient needs with triage technology backed by our on-demand triage team. Whether you need after-hours triage, our cost-saving hybrid triage solutions, or in-house triage call-center infrastructure, we help you flex and extend your care so you reach patients in the moments they need help the most. From home health and hospice to health systems and more, CareXM will transform your patient approach to lower operating costs.