Tag: healthcare services

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!

‘Necessity is the mother of invention’ the old proverb becomes the ultimate truth for global healthcare organizations in the current situation. The front-line healthcare staff has been fighting a war against the dreadful human tragedy due to COVID-19. In these turbulent times, digital technology is reshaping the care delivery system globally.

The healthcare industry was pretty slow in embracing the digital age. But, after the Corona pandemic, healthcare organizations have picked up at an unprecedented pace in the digital transformation journey. Also, more than 50%^*** of patients are now ready to adopt digital tools as a way of quick cure solutions. Within six months, some significant variations were observed in medical management, like:

• Doctors and care staffs became more digitally matured in different hospitals
• More confidence & willingness among staff and patients to use technology
• Funding to invest in the medical IT infrastructure

Healthcare leaders have been spellbound by noticing how technology has stepped up to help the affected people in this pandemic. A report reveals a 500%^* increase in telehealth visits and remote worker’s number almost double-ups.

Providence Health of Washington State has reconfigured their chatbot ‘Grace’ with FAQ’s and COVID-19 symptoms related assessment. Providence Digital Innovation Group has noticed that 70,000 ^* patients log into the chatbot and received over one million emails enquiring about the disease symptoms and doctor consultations. The number of virtual visits has gone up by 10 to 15 times compared to the pre-pandemic situation.

Millions of people are now welcoming digital care therapies and open to adopting the virtual health visit. Now, most on-demand digital care services are:

• On-demand medical appointments, home therapies, and care suggestion through telehealth
• Physicians and hospitals are using big-data insights and cloud storage to track and manage patient data
• Medical wearable devices to control health 24/7 and improve preventive measurements
• The virtual collaboration that helps doctors and caregivers to get trained in a better way
• Artificial intelligence that makes personalized treatment possible
• COVID-19 Self-assessment survey designed by healthcare marketers to check the valuable data among the population and initiate quick actions

Considering the present situation, the Government is relaxing healthcare regulations. Since the onset of the pandemic, social distancing has become mandatory for everyone, and that has started an experiment on remote care. The remote treatment makes patients more digitally empowered than ever.

According to the Google database report, from the starting of January to now, the most searched term is “Vaccine,” including the phrase “COVID-19 Vaccine trial and update.” Moreover, the below statistics have revealed a substantial increase in searches of preventive measures in South Asian countries.

Based on these above facts, we have found some astounding impacts on the global healthcare business due to this rapid transformation. An American market research company has already observed a hockey stick curve of the virtual care adoption system in the United States. Besides, US health insurers have admitted covering coronavirus related telemedicine. A French firm Doctolib SAS has experienced an 18-fold jump^** on the medical video consultation within March 2020. Over one million people have used NHS 111online support for assessing nCov symptoms within the first week of site launching.

Besides all these benefits, there are some challenges in a digital transformation like:

• Equal opportunity access
• Clinical support to the patient for optimizing technology
• Training to handle new expertise and others 

However, healthcare organizations can get rid of these challenges and improve their adoption scale by following the below characteristics.

References:

* Padmanabhan, P (contributor of CIO) ‘How the COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping healthcare with technology’, CIO, India Retrieved from: https://www.cio.com/article/3534499/how-the-covid-19-pandemic-is-reshaping-healthcare-with-technology.html

** Rethinking Digital Transformation of Healthcare Amid COVID-19: How Marketers Can Adapt to Changing Dynamics Retrieved from: https://useinsider.com/healthcare-amid-covid-19/

*** Vikram Kapur and Alex Boulton Covid-19 Accelerates the Adoption of Telemedicine in Asia-Pacific Countries, BAIN & COMPANY, Retrieved from: https://www.bain.com/insights/covid-19-accelerates-the-adoption-of-telemedicine-in-asia-pacific-countries/