What you can automate in your healthcare app 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?

2. What you can automate in your healthcare app workflows

3. How we built software for the medical industry

4. Should you automate your healthcare workflows?

5. Types of apps you can build for the medical industry

When working in healthcare, you’re already extremely busy and tired by default. And then you’re hit by charting, handwritten notes you don’t understand, chaotic schedules that clash, or patients that miss appointments and need to be rescheduled on specific days.

So while you’re already burnt out, you’ve got so much more work to do that feels repetitive, exhausting and takes up the mental load you should be using when treating patients.

When owning medical clinics, you have to deliver good results to your patients, to make them happy and most importantly, healthy. But how can you do that when your staff is tired from tiny tasks that are way below their paygrade?

In healthcare, automation has lately been a go-to solution for better workflows and patient care. Let a machine take care of appointment reminders, lab routing, care alerts or follow-ups. Focus on what matters.

We've already told you how manual healthcare workflows make you lose time & money. So in this article, we’re going to give you some real examples on what exactly you can automate in your clinical practice.

What is healthcare automation and why do you need it?

Before we jump into examples, we need to talk about what automation in healthcare even is, in the first place. Automation, by definition, is a process where you limit human intervention by making a process happen automatically, usually generated by a computer or some sort of electronic device.

In the case of healthcare, just like NetSuite says, automation helps take repetitive tasks that waste your staff’s time and make them happen without your intervention, so you can move more efficiently and focus better on patient care. It’s about appointment management, patient intake, notifications, communication, charting, lab flows, and whichever processes are relevant to your specialty (maybe you deal with dentures, complex surgeries or state-regulated medications).

Here are a few things clinics automate in their healthcare process:

• Patient intake
• Appointment scheduling, cancelling, changing or reminding
• Insurance claim checks
• Lab routing
• Alerts and notifications

Automation helps you organize your process better and prevent burnout: staff won’t get sick of repetitive tasks anymore, at most they’d get sick from sick patients. A study by Stefan De Hert highlights that when medical staff is burnt out, they’re prone to making more mistakes, paying less attention and having trouble focusing on their work.

But when automation takes care of essential yet tedious tasks, your staff will be able to focus on patients and not on sending out messages, receiving calls, walking over to labs and back, or wasting hours typing out hundreds of patient charts.

We’ve already gone into more detail on how manual healthcare workflows make you lose time & money in a different article. But to sum it up, manual data entry, scheduling, and billing eat up to 40% of staff time every week. Inefficient systems and delayed processes mean missed appointments, slower reimbursements, and poor cash flow visibility. And most of all, human error in medical data or billing can cost thousands in rework and compliance fines.

Up next, since we’ve explained what healthcare automation is, we’re going to list a few very specific ways you can automate your own workflows.

Patient intake & scheduling

Automation is a great way to manage patient data and their appointments. If you’re stuck doing this the old way, using pen and paper, you’re opening yourself up to a lot of issues. It’s so much easier to damage or lose pieces of paper than electronic records. Privacy has left the chat, and doctors don’t have the nicest handwriting.

Imagine doctors do all your patients’ medical history using pen and paper: most of you won’t be able to read it back, and you might still have to input all that information into a computer for better data keeping. So from the start, you’re doing the same thing twice for no reason.

When it comes to appointments, automation allows you to get notified of who’s supposed to come in and when, it helps you find better slots to schedule patients in, and it’s also a great way to help patients keep track of when they need to come. Medical providers we’ve worked with helped us discover just how important it is to automate appointment scheduling & notifications.

So here are a few specific ways automation can help you with patient intake & scheduling:

Self-service bookings and check-ins

You can allow patients to book, reschedule, and cancel appointments 24/7 by either using AI-powered chat bots or pre-built automated processes that only give them the options they should get (like only being able to move an appointment to an empty available slot, and not whatever time they want). 

You can also allow them to check into your clinics through your own app of self-service desks, which frees up your receptionists and keeps lines shorter.

Digital patient onboarding 

Once a new patient calls to make an appointment, you can automatically send and collect medical history questionnaires, consent forms, and insurance uploads. This works best for dental clinics or minor procedures where you need to know some basic information to prep quicker, such as allergies or disabilities (or even whether the patient is afraid of needles). This will speed you up significantly, so that patients will just walk in and get their procedures done right away.

Manage patient waitlists

Automating your healthcare flows allows you to notify patients on a waitlist when earlier appointment slots open up. Your system can simply detect when an appointment was canceled and notify the first patient on your waitlist. You can even go the next level and organize waitlist patients depending on availability, diagnosis, procedure complexity or whatever is more relevant for your specialty.

Appointment reminders & confirmations

You can send automated appointment reminders via SMS, email, or even as push notifications in your own software in order to cut down on no-shows. This is also a great way to ask patients to confirm appointments, either through a simple page within your app or through a quick text message response. This way, staff can focus on activities that can only be done through phone calls.

Clinical workflows, management & key operations

Automation doesn’t only help you improve patient care, but also the way your clinic runs its day to day operations. Chaotic paperwork, labs, charts, referrals, all take a lot of time and effort - and your staff might find them a bit tedious.

AI Charting & Transcription

Long gone are the days where tired doctors take hours typing out charts. You can use automated ambient listening and dictation-to-text tools to transcribe patient visits, structure clinical notes and keep track of what recommendations & prescriptions you made.

Managing lab work & results

Going to and from a lab to get results can take a toll on your team or it might be that task you assign nurses and interns instead of letting them actually practice medicine. With automation, you can notify staff when labs are finalized and push results directly to their patient portal, so they don’t have to go anywhere. 

This works great if you have your own labs, or your development partner can talk to the labs you use and build software that integrates all your workflows.

Tracking patient referrals

Patients get sent from a doctor to another all the time, but it’s easy to forget or to lose track if all of that happens on pieces of paper or through text messages. If you build your own software for your practice, you can track and route electronic referrals to specialists, and automatically notify primary care providers of updates, in case they send patients to you.

Medical billing & claims processing

Billing is always a pain, but you still need to get paid in order to stay afloat - and it should be done correctly. You might try to keep track of bills, invoices and insurance claims manually, but when inputting all key data about costs, treatments, medications and insurance coverage into a software-based system, it’s all organized for you seamlessly.

Eligibility verification

Not all procedures and medications are covered by every patient’s insurance or private healthcare plan. You can try to run automated batch checks to verify insurance benefits and flag coverage issues prior to appointments, so you can give patients an estimated cost.

Submit claims while avoiding denials

Insurance claims can often get declined for the smallest things. Instead of having to manually look through policies or wait until you get denied, you can automate the whole process. Your system can analyze claims and find potential risks, so you can edit them before submitting.

Payment reminders, billing and invoicing

Instead of asking patients through uncomfortable phone calls, you can send automated digital receipts, outstanding balance alerts, and simple payment prompts where they just have to input their data and submit. This takes away the pain of “begging” for money from your patients while still ensuring they’re aware they owe you.

EHR Data Management

You might be wasting 10-15 hours weekly in manual record handling. Paperwork, binders, post its: it can get pretty chaotic. How could you explain to a patient you lost their information because the wind blew some papers away? EHR (electronic health record) systems help, but a lot of them are outdated.

Integrate data better

Some clinics use a variety of EHRs for different purposes or to adapt to different data formats. With properly-done automation, you should be able to integrate data seamlessly across multiple EHRs. According to The Momentum, different EHRs use different data systems, and your biggest challenge is to help them “talk” to each other. That’s already cutting out a lot of time and effort. 

A great solution is exporting all that data, using automated tools to make sure they’re in the same format, and importing them into a singular system that suits your clinical needs.

Better patient data management

An automated system, integrated correctly, can detect if a patient got scans or further investigations done and pull that data into your system so you can continue treating and evaluating their condition.

If a patient came in multiple times over the years, automation helps you find their previous records, merge duplicates and avoid making new ones that don’t make use of existing patient data. Patient history is key in medicine, so your system needs to be able to keep track of all data you’ve collected, whilst keeping it safe and HIPPA and/or GDPR compliant.

Patient communication & engagement

Last but not the least, implementing workflow automation in healthcare helps you maintain a better connection with your patients. You can increase patient engagement by up to 30% just by implementing a few simple yet essential features within your workflow.

Notify patients automatically

You might be losing a lot of time calling patients to remind them of their appointments, or to confirm whether they’re coming or not. You can set up automated follow-ups and appointment reminders to save that time. Remind patients of when they need to come in, give them directions or instructions on how to prepare, based on existing data in your system. Without you doing anything.

Medical chatbots that solve small issues quicker

Some patients might be calling and using valuable time for very simple questions. Free up that time by adding chatbots for basic inquiries and triage, either in your website or app. These chats will detect when the patient needs more complex help and direct them to an actual human being. But until then, a chatbot is more than enough to help them with procedure information, labwork instructions, appointment information or management, and so on.

Helpful medical content to promote & inform

You’ve got so much patient data that you might never have the time to go through. But an automated healthcare system can actively browse through diagnoses, appointment histories and medications in order to deliver personalized educational content to your patients. Maybe they need to come in for a tooth cleaning every 6 months but it’s been 6 years. Tell them why it’s important and help both the patients and your business.

Getting feedback and reviews

You can set up automated messages that ask patients to review doctors and their overall clinic experience, that get sent out once their appointments are set to be finished. This is a great way to easily gather feedback, which you can use to inform other patients on what your doctors are like. And of course, if patients report any negative experiences, you get to find out in time. A properly built system will also help you get all key data about the patient, their diagnosis and appointment so you can fix the issue.

Overall, there’s so much of healthcare that needs to start living in the future. EHRs are old and outdated, and some clinics might benefit more from exporting EHR data and moving it into a personalized system, adapted to their specialty and patient needs. Custom medical software can be built to be safer and much easier to use (not to mention more pleasing to the eye).

If you’re looking for a custom medical app, we’ve already done quite a few. Let’s chat and see how we can work together.

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