Medical services are rarely seamless. Scheduling appointments, sending follow-up reminders, and organizing payments (and everything in between) takes time and effort away from patient-centric care. Patient data is entered, moved, and annotated by hand. This leaves room for mistakes. It can even result in delayed appointments, payment issues, or uncertainty about a patient’s next steps in their healthcare journey. However, providers are finding ways to make healthcare automation work in their favor and many have already made the shift.
We share 5 key ways that automation in healthcare is transforming the experience for patients and providers. We also explain how Wrk can help healthcare professionals streamline their healthcare processes, meet increasing telehealth demands, and provide the best patient experience possible.
1. Healthcare on demand
It’s no secret that telehealth is a necessity and increasingly popular. At the beginning of the pandemic, 71% of patients in the U.S. considered telehealth services, and 50% had already utilized virtual appointments. By 2025, the telehealth market is expected to grow more than 7 times as much and healthcare providers are tasked with meeting this increased demand.
The good news is that healthcare workflow automation solutions already exist to meet these demands. Below are some examples of how simple workflows can instantly improve the quality of patient-centric healthcare.
Generate an appointment
With automation, healthcare professionals can clearly state their availability using scheduling programs and allow patients to select a time from an automatically generated calendar. Patients can be effortlessly reminded of appointment times with automated reminders via SMS, email, or even voice messaging.
A Generate Wrk Action can help healthcare professionals communicate their availability to patients easily. In particular, the “Generate in Calendly” Wrk Action allows healthcare providers to generate their availability, follow-up emails, and appointment descriptions. Our Wrkflows can easily be adapted to suit your scheduling application of choice.
Make a house call
Once it’s time for the appointment, making a call to a patient can be done on schedule, ensuring no appointment is missed and no time is wasted.
Our “Call” Wrk Action can work with various programs, from Skype to Whatsapp, to make a voice or video call according to your schedule. By setting a trigger, healthcare professionals can trust that their calls will be made according to their schedule and automatic generation of meeting details will leave them prepared for the appointment.
While telehealth services make healthcare more convenient. Wrk can ensure key programs work together seamlessly. Easy drag-and-drop workflows make it possible to link appointments and scheduling software to patient information databases, connecting the dots to provide a comprehensive picture of a patient’s needs before a meeting.
2. Smoother consultation experience
Usually, when patients attend appointments with a new healthcare provider, they must fill out lengthy forms outlining their medical history and the reason for their visit. They’re often tasked with repeating the same information several times. This amounts to much wasted time and can lead to frustration for patients and medical professionals. These routine tasks are an example of the administrative duties that comprise an estimated 30% of healthcare costs.
With a good automated workflow, patients can fill out preliminary intake forms and then upload them to their electronic health record (EHR) simultaneously. Beyond that, this data can be redirected to the appropriate institution, department, or practitioner based on rules, ensuring that the right people have the right information at the right time—no repetition is necessary.
Not only does the time saved on administrative tasks help healthcare providers reduce healthcare costs, but it also allows practitioners to provide a better standard of care.
Automating healthcare processes can open up new pathways to improved patient care by redirecting added revenue into better healthcare facilities, support, and future projects while reducing the risk of error in manual data entry and its less-than-reliable transmission.
Wrk's flexible solutions combine both RPA and APIs. This makes it easy to connect your administrative software to healthcare databases. Intuitive Wrkflows can help practitioners rest assured that their patient data is up-to-date and easily accessible and that nothing falls through the cracks during their appointment.
The results? Less waiting room delays and more personalized care, whether the appointment is in-person or online. Automation in healthcare lets providers scale their processes to meet new needs without spending extra money.
3. Data at your fingertips
Compiling a vast sea of data at the click of a button can equip healthcare teams with the knowledge to enhance their patient care significantly. One major stressor for healthcare providers is the potential to be overburdened by unexpected admissions influx. With data at their fingertips, healthcare teams can be ready with numbers to help them figure out how many people they need to hire. At the same time, simultaneously identifying and informing preventive plans to reduce the load in clinics and in the ER.
With automation, medical professionals can access patient information quickly. Photo credit: Canva
Even though healthcare organizations may know when their busiest times are, it can be hard to figure out their staffing needs without the right data. A Data Annotation Wrkflow can help teams make sense of key data that they already have. Well-annotated data helps teams visualize trends in staffing needs throughout the year based on historical data so they can plan accordingly. With continuous, automatic updates providing real-time data, short staffing can be a thing of the past.
With comprehensive data, healthcare professionals can also inform practitioners like never before. Compiling patient data can provide insights to predictive analysis and help with preventative care. Automating data annotation can identify key points in a patient’s medical history that can inform healthcare professionals’ practice to prevent undue admission into emergency care.
Wrk’s automated Data Migration Preparation Wrkflow allows physicians and practitioners to easily update their databases with the most recent patient information, ensuring that transferring patient data to other facilities is fast and reliable. With the right workflow, we can equip practitioners with the tools to give their patients the care they need whenever needed, regardless of where they are.
4. Hassle and error-free payment process
Processing payments is still one of a healthcare business's most time-consuming and important parts. Processing insurance claims can be particularly time-consuming for healthcare teams, and mistakes are common. With more virtual visits, there will be more chances for mistakes when processing payments. This will be especially noticeable if virtual healthcare hasn't grown to meet the new demand.
In the U.S., an estimated 25% of healthcare costs go toward billing, usually for insurance. The good thing about these jobs is that they are easy to automate because they are repetitive and predictable. Most use automation to combat this historically costly process, improving turnover time of claims processing by an estimated 75-85%. This is a major benefit for healthcare teams that had previously had to take on the entire payment process.
Using healthcare process automation to accelerate the payment process is easy once you pilot Wrk’s Accounts Payable, Receivable & Invoicing Wrkflow and tweak it where you see fit. Drag-n-drop your favorite Wrk Actions to reap the benefits of a streamlined payment processing solution. Automatically scheduling follow-up calls, creating invoices in Quickbooks, and sending payment reminders gives your healthcare team more time to focus on patient health and frees up money for future healthcare projects.
More specifically, automatically generating payment information can help expedite insurance pre-authorization and prompt follow-ups for any outstanding payments. Medical billing automation can help make bills faster so patients can leave their appointments with the information they need to pay their deductibles. Patients can focus on receiving the care they need without the hassle of organizing their bills. You can also assure healthcare providers that their payments are going to the right place.
5. Seamless Discharging
Process automation can bolster the healthcare experience by establishing clear routines and follow-up procedures for recently discharged patients. Once a patient has left their medical appointment, the next steps are often unclear or quickly forgotten. To avoid future setbacks, healthcare providers can organize a workflow to manage all post-appointment needs: automatically arrange follow-up appointments for their patients, schedule regular check-in messages, and send out appointment reminders.
You can easily export appointment follow-up notes and send them out to patients with the click of a button. Using a Wrkflow template like the Personalized Email Wrkflow can help providers organize follow-up emails that are relevant to their patients, automatically review which patients require a follow-up email, search their record for important next steps, generate a discharge summary, and send the email via their preferred contact management software.
Up-to-date discharge information can be simultaneously passed over to specialists or other facilities, ensuring they have the information they need to continue providing personalized care.
Further, the “Send” Wrk Action can send out pre-scheduled follow-up appointment reminders so you don't leave patients and providers in the dark about when the next appointment will occur.
The Future of Healthcare
By automating administrative and operational tasks and data collection, healthcare workflow automation can help projects take less time and cost less money. This can open up new treatment options and healthcare solutions. The less time healthcare practitioners lose to repetitive administrative tasks, the more time they have available to provide the quality of patient-centric care they strive to offer.
The future of healthcare is brighter with automation. All stakeholders will see a major reduction in stress and frustration.
The right Wrkflow makes scaling your organization simpler than ever—so why not try it out today? Discover how you can automate your business processes with simply powerful Wrkflows!
