Are you losing time & money to manual healthcare workflows?

This article is part of a series about healthcare software automation. See below a list of all the articles in this series, they’ll be linked as we post them. If you don’t see links below, they’re most likely coming soon:

1. Are you losing time & money to manual healthcare workflows? THIS ARTICLE
2. What you can automate in your healthcare app workflows (coming soon)
3. How we built software for the medical industry (coming soon)
4. Should you automate your healthcare workflows? (coming soon)
5. Types of apps you can build for the medical industry (coming soon)

Are you doing healthcare workflows completely manually? Then you’re definitely losing both time and money.

When you’re managing a medical clinic or a hospital, whether you treat people, pets or wild animals, you handle lots of complex data. Treatments get complicated, people miss appointments, insurance gets messy, and slowly you fall into complete and utter chaos.

A lot of the time, clinics keep data in stale, dated software that’s overly complex and user-unfriendly. Or worse, you guys might be relying on spreadsheets or even analog notebooks. 

Granted, with a small patient base and non-complex procedures, writing appointments down in a notebook is not such a big deal. People show up, get their treatments and go on their way.

But what happens when you handle a major clinic that provides a series of treatments that need to happen on a very strict timeline? What happens when you handle several clinics across multiple cities, with different patients and staff? And then how do you handle staff schedules and figure out if your doctors and nurses are even available?

When you handle so many things manually, tiny little issues will fall through the cracks. You risk breaking compliance laws. Would you be okay with going to jail because you chose to use spreadsheets? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

This article isn’t meant to scold medical practices whose workflows are still manual or analog. We’re here to tell you from our experience, in a series of articles, how automating healthcare workflows can change your business and your patients’ lives for the better. First, we’re going to talk about whether you’re wasting time & money with your current workflow.

Why manual healthcare workflows are inefficient for your team

Your role as a healthcare provider isn’t to write down data on paper all day, but to actually treat patients, retain them, improve their treatments and overall lives. The issue with manual healthcare workflows is that you and your staff spend so much time and effort doing other things, that patients don’t get all the energy, attention and passion they deserve.

Here are several ways your healthcare business wastes time and money through manual processes. This doesn’t only waste resources, but it’s a way your staff gets burnt out and can’t do their biggest job so well, which is treating patients.

So what are the biggest ways manual workflows slow down your healthcare business?

Manual data entry

Managing patient data is a big part of healthcare. You have to keep a thorough history of their health before you started treating them, what treatments you gave them, how those treatments worked, what kind of medication they used to take & what you gave them. It’s a lot to keep track of, and the bigger the clinic, the bigger the effort.

A survey done by The BMJ highlights that healthcare workers still rely on paper patient notes and drug charts, even though there are many digital alternatives available such as EHRs.

By spending so much time writing data either on paper, in spreadsheets or in state-mandated software, your staff burns out. They end up doing more typing than treating. Sometimes, they might end up sitting more in front of a computer than in front of a patient.

By any means, we’re not saying data entry is something you shouldn’t do. A study from PubMed Central highlights that keeping track of patient, treatment, insurance, procedure, medication data and so on is a big part of healthcare. 

Few patients can detail their own information well enough and you can’t give treatments or medication without knowing if they can interact negatively with other things the patient takes or deals with health-wise.

But some manual data entry tasks take so much time and effort that it doesn’t feel like patient care, but more like just pure data entry. The Canadian Medical Association found that physicians spend nearly 20 million hours on administrative tasks, which automated workflows intend to fix.

Managing staff schedules

Patients aren’t the only element holding a healthcare business together. Staff is a key part of your activity: your doctors, nurses, orderlies, receptionists, and other types of staff relevant to your specialty. You need to know when they work, for how long, where (if you handle multiple locations), what they do and what patients they handle.

When you handle multiple locations, different types of staff and many different people, it’s hard to keep track. Even more so if you do it all manually. Lots of clinics end up having to remember who’s working and when, and as much as we encourage keeping our brains active in this era, human memory isn’t foolproof.

The issue with managing staff data like roles, schedules, time off and activity all manually is that it’s easy to forget or lose key information. You might forget when a certain doctor took time off because they only announced it on Whatsapp and you didn’t update your schedule spreadsheet. Or maybe a patient just called asking for a specific procedure and your main doctor who does it isn’t available, but your list of doctors doesn’t say who else can do the procedure.

In some cases, experienced staff members know all of this information, but what happens when they’re busy, or go on vacation or even quit? You can’t rely on a single person’s memory to handle all your staff information. Even more so when doctors and nurses might want to manage their schedule and time off by themselves, and not to wait in line for the one management person to do it for them.

Handling invoices & billing

A big caveat or issue you might deal with when managing a medical clinic is billing, especially when insurance is involved. You have to somehow keep track of how much your procedures cost, what it costs to add things to a procedure (maybe you add an ultrasound to a check-up, which costs extra), and how insurance influences it all.

The American Hospital Association says just Medicare rules and regulations alone cover over 130,000 pages, while hospitals deal with 1,600 insurers all with their own plans and unique requirements. And that’s just the United States.

As we found through our work with healthcare companies, in some countries, insurance decides what kind of medication a patient can receive (without extra costs) - so how do you handle that data manually? Do you memorize what medications are covered by which insurance and mentally calculate how much a patient has to pay? Sounds pretty over the top, doesn’t it?

You can handle lots of parts of healthcare manually with no issues, but billing is a whole other challenge. No matter how hard you’ll try, you’ll most likely end up handling gigantic spreadsheets that need to be updated every year or every few months.

Managing complex procedures

Several medical procedures out there involve complex relations and schedules. Some have to happen in series of appointments, handle different medications catered to each patient, or are influenced by insurance. As we worked on such a project, we found out how complex medical procedures can really get.

The caveat with handling such complex procedures is that you have to rely on the people you know all of these details, that is, doctors. And they’re certainly not un-busy, so imagine trying to pester your doctors all day with annoying questions about how certain procedures work.

Instead, you could put all of these rules into a system and let it set up procedures and appointment schedules for you. And so, you could work faster without medical knowledge. By keeping all of this information just in some people’s heads, you have to rely on them all the time.

Ways manual processes in healthcare affect your business

Manual workflows in healthcare don’t just affect how long it takes to do your day to day work and burn you out. As much as it negatively affects your internal workings, doing everything manually can also affect the way your business operates overall. Does it matter if you do things well internally if you’ve got no money at all?

So what are a few ways manual healthcare workflows affect your business overall?

Lost revenue

Inefficient systems and delayed processes mean missed appointments, slower reimbursements, and poor cash flow visibility. If you’re moving so slow, so will your revenue cycle.

Without some form of digitalization or automation, you’re relying on paper and memory to keep track of appointments, billing, costs, who owes you and who you owe, and so on. You’re not optimizing anything.

Automation ensures every workflow, from intake to billing, runs on time and on budget. Any financial bottlenecks would be taken care of.

Errors

Human error in medical data or billing can cost thousands to fix and rework, plus you’re exposed to various compliance fines - either HIPAA or GDPR.

Without automated checks and data synchronization, even small mistakes can snowball into costly issues. Automation can quickly find when costs, invoices or appointments aren’t adding up, and can even give suggestions on how to fix those problems, especially when powered by AI.

Compliance risks

Long gone are the days where doctors would discuss your information with the door open and a waiting room full of people. When working with sensitive data every single day, it’s your duty to keep it safe. And not just because it’s morally recommended to do so, but it’s also the law.

By keeping electronic health records, data can be kept locked up much easier. Only those with the right credentials can enter the system and view patient data. By reducing manual record-keeping, it’s easier to stay compliant. You won’t be keeping personal information on sheets of paper anyone can read.

Lack of business & patient stats

A hidden cost of manual workflows, even in healthcare, is you get no stats regarding your work. You can’t generate reports, view dashboards or see patient progress unless you take the time to go through all your files or hold meetings to ask your staff.

Through EHR systems or custom software, you can review your revenue stats, see how many patients are attending appointments and how many aren’t, how many patients you have, and so on. You save several hours by viewing data that’s put together by a machine, while your staff can focus on patient care. By using AI automation, you could potentially also get treatment plan suggestions or notifications that a patient’s treatment isn’t going well.

Is there a solution to inefficient healthcare workflows?

Obviously, when manual workflows don’t work well enough, automated workflows most likely will. It’s not always about your staff or lack of time, but sometimes it’s as simple as how much time you spend writing things down on paper over and over again.

You can make significant cost savings by automating critical processes such as data entry & analysis, managing invoices or staff schedules. Your staff will get more time to do truly important work. Instead of getting burnt out, they can improve their outcomes and focus more on patients.

Here are a few key elements of a healthcare business that you can automate: 

• Patient intake & scheduling. You can track appointments easier when using digital calendars as opposed to a thick & old notebook. And once patients do come in, you can input their medical history into a computerized system so you can easily reach it again later.
• Medical billing & claims processing. You can create a system that knows a patient’s insurance status and generates the right invoices for them. 
• EHR data management. You can keep easier track of patient data and even generate stats and reports to use in their treatments. 
• Laboratory workflows. Through automation, you can keep a better record of lab results or procedures and then send them to the doctors who need them.
• Practice management operations. Automation helps you reduce manual work spent tracking staff schedules and availability.
• Patient communication & engagement. Instead of having to contact patients manually, you can set up a system that notifies them of upcoming appointments, forms to fill, and more.

All in all, improving efficiency in a healthcare organization can make a major difference, whether you automate using AI or regular software or by simply digitalizing your operations. By lowering the amount of manual work you do, you’ve already saved time & money.

But in order to do that, you have to take a good look at your activity and find what’s not working. You can’t fix your processes blindly, you gotta find exactly what you need to improve. Maybe you’re relying on analog processes too much and you just need more computers to keep a hold of patient and appointment data. Maybe you spend time figuring out treatment plans that a complex AI-powered system could think of for you. It really comes down to what you do & what exactly you need.

If you’re having trouble figuring it out and you know you’re losing time and money to manual workflows, we can work together to find what’s not clicking and how we can fix it. Let’s talk and see what we can do, or you can read more about how we automate healthcare workflows.

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