Healthcare
Table of Contents
Modern healthcare challenges, such as the rising cost of care and its availability, medical personnel shortages, and the growing amount of patient data, motivate healthcare providers to find new ways of workflow optimization and care improvement.
Automation in healthcare is the solution. It unites dozens of technologies that renovate the industry, making care more effective and efficient. Discover key benefits of healthcare automation for hospitals, clinics, and private practices in our article.
Automation in healthcare means the application of the latest technologies to complete routine, repeated tasks without human actions in hospitals and clinics.
Medical personnel's work goes far beyond patient appointments. Before the computer era, doctors needed to fill in various forms, make handwritten entries to patient medical charts, and gather various test results for analysis.
Despite the rise of electronic medical records (EMRs), lots of data still needs to be organized manually. Medical automation offers error-prone, quick data collection and processing. It reduces time spent on administrative tasks, lowers stress levels, and reduces staff burnout risks.
Medical automation can be divided into two categories: applied to administrative and diagnostics and treatment-related. Below is a detailed breakdown of both.
This type of healthcare automation includes improvements in billing systems, appointment scheduling, and medical records management. It also contributes to workflow automation in healthcare, which is computerizing all managerial systems and tasks.
This type deals with everything concerning patient-doctor interactions and medical treatment. Medical data analysis, with the help of AI and machine learning, helps automation identify abnormalities in test results, highlight patterns, and check drug contraindications. That is how healthcare automation allows patients to receive more accurate and personalized treatment recommendations.
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Automation in the healthcare industry benefits all its participants: medical staff, healthcare organizations, and patients. Wonder how? Let's figure out.
For patients
Centralized and automated patient data processing improves diagnosis and makes the whole picture more comprehensive. Automation enables quick data access, highlights patient deviation from care plans, and allows for more precise drug dosage prescriptions.
Non-adherence to medication is a significant healthcare issue, leading to 10% of hospitalizations and up to $290 billion in yearly costs in the United States. Automation in healthcare allows patients to be notified about taking medications through notifications and wearable devices.
While health conditions are well-classified, we are all different, with specific genetics, reactions to certain treatments, allergies, diverse environments, and lifestyles. Automation in healthcare considers patients' personal characteristics and can give doctors recommendations on treatment plans. The system can analyze patient history and lab results, further offering personalized approaches to treatment planning.
The sources of personal patient data include:
Personalized care is especially important for chronic disease treatment and even its prevention. Tailored therapies and proactive measures, including lifestyle education, risk monitoring, and medication, can significantly reduce disease impact.
The optimized and convenient scheduling process is perhaps the most mentioned one when we talk about healthcare automation. The system manages available appointment times and dates, physician availability, examination rooms, and equipment. The patient can book appointments 24/7, choosing the most convenient time, rescheduling, and canceling if necessary (and 60% of customers expect to be able to change scheduled appointments). They also receive appointment reminders and notifications through patient portals and mobile apps.
For doctors
Excessive workloads, administrative tasks, and lack of organizational support contribute greatly to medical staff burnout. What can be done to reduce their stress levels? Workflow automation in healthcare reduces manual and repetitive tasks for doctors and other medical staff members, lowering administrative workload and leading to less stress and burnout at the workplace. Automation increases productivity and efficiency for healthcare workers, allowing them to focus on patients rather than paperwork.
Patient data centralization and analysis with the help of AI offer valuable insight into patient conditions, quick and precise diagnostics, and treatment advice. AI-powered diagnostics help identify early-stage diseases, decrease medical data overload, and enhance analytic capabilities.
Another aspect of healthcare automation is lab automation. Robots prepare and analyze samples, reducing human error and improving turnaround times. An automated system receives faster test results; the earlier the doctor can start treatment, the better the outcomes.
The use of wearable devices adds value to medical automation. Biosensors, smart watches, fitness bracelets, and testing kits allow remote patient vitals monitoring and data storage. Regular checks of blood pressure, sugar levels, saturation, etc., help adjust treatment in time, leading to better care results.
Automation in healthcare plays a central role in ensuring timely and effective follow-up care for patients. The system can:
The use of healthcare automation software, such as EMR/EHR, creates a central hub for medical data of various kinds from various sources. It provides data visualization tools and helps to receive comprehensive pictures of patients, eliminating the risk of conflicting or outdated information.
Automated medical systems can store:
Automation in the healthcare industry leads to better decision-making and more efficient disease treatment. By leveraging the power of data visibility, EMRs are transforming healthcare organizations into more efficient, patient-centered, and data-driven entities.
For healthcare organizations
Health-related concerns must be taken seriously and receive fast response. Whether patients want to reschedule a visit or ask questions about the prescribed medicine, the best practice is to answer ASAP. That is where healthcare automation comes to light.
A recent survey found that 65% of customers stop using a company after a bad customer service experience. This means clinics, hospitals, and medical practices must provide fast and helpful support to keep patients happy. But how?
Healthcare automation improves customer support by providing instant answers through chatbots and virtual assistants, allowing patients to access online services like medical records and appointment scheduling, and ensuring good customer service to retain patients. Online interactions provide valuable user experience and increase customer satisfaction.
Seamless communication between teams and departments is vital for clinics and hospitals and can substantially increase the quality of care. Complex health issues may require several teams to collaborate, and automation in healthcare helps to do it efficiently. Fast information access between departments and facilities leads to better patient outcomes, improved patient flow, and improved hospital systems interoperability.
Secure messaging between doctors and patients is also valuable. For people from remote areas who cannot come to the clinic, automation in healthcare provides the opportunity to visit doctors online via mobile app or web platform.
Workflow automation in healthcare organizations facilitates data and document management and saves precious time for nurses and physicians. Software systems can automate repetitive workflows, reduce paperwork, and accelerate healthcare. The benefits of automation include streamlining labor-intensive processes and reducing medical errors.
With the help of AI and ML technologies, automation in the healthcare industry revolutionizes cost optimization. AI-powered patient admission prediction modernizes healthcare resource management. By analyzing vast datasets of patient information, including medical histories, demographics, and real-time vital signs, AI algorithms can accurately forecast patient admission rates. Automated software systems can identify inefficiency and implement targeted improvements, leading to cost savings and improved outcomes.
Additionally, automated systems help to identify and quickly fix potentially costly data errors and ensure compliance, which, if ignored, can lead to huge fees.
As the COVID-19 pandemic shows, sudden peaks in patient flow can distress healthcare systems. Medical automation helps predict such increases and timely adjust staffing levels. AI algorithms can prioritize patients and provide personalized care through comprehensive data analysis. Moreover, automated systems allow remote patient care and fast and effective communication between specialists during social distancing.
Automation in healthcare ensures regulatory compliance, protects patient privacy, and reduces the risk of costly fines. Automated systems help organizations identify data issues, track documentation, and stay up-to-date with regulations.
There are several areas to automate compliance tasks in healthcare:
Now that we've discovered diverse advantages for all parties involved in healthcare organizations, let's find out how automation works.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning deal with large volumes of data generated daily. AI can collect, store, and process data, analyze it, and create customized reports. AI facilitates disease identification and diagnosis in various specialties, from cardiology to mental health. ML is mostly aimed at precision medicine, allowing us to estimate what treatment protocols can succeed.
The Future Health Index survey shows that 88% of respondents believe medical automation is vital for addressing healthcare shortages. It can reduce the administrative burden on personnel, make treatment recommendations, enhance diagnostic accuracy, and improve patient outcomes.
The risk factors for AI and ML development include the data quality and accessibility for ML learning, security and privacy concerns, implementation costs, technical complexity, skill gaps, and human acceptance of new technology.
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Robotic process automation (RPA) in healthcare automation refers to using specialized software with bots that automate administrative tasks, such as revenue cycle management, claim processing, staffing optimization, and reporting. RPA combines user interface and API interactions to automate back-office tasks. It automates repetitive tasks, improves data safety, and saves personnel time. RPA, coupled with AI, increases efficiency and helps process high-volume tasks faster.
Common RPA activities:
The healthcare RPA market reached $1,76 billion in 2023 and is expected to reach $14,18 billion by 2032, with an impressive CAGR of 26.1%. The US is expected to hold 42,6% of the market share by region in 2024. The growth is underpinned by rising healthcare costs that RPA can slow down, rising patient expectations about the quality of care, and a lack of healthcare professionals.
The potential challenges of RPA implementation for automation in the healthcare industry are data management complexity, implementation costs, data silos, and remaining reliance on paper-based records. Nevertheless, the technology continues to develop and strives to eliminate these hitches.
Augmented and virtual reality improves healthcare results in various ways. It enables anatomy training for medical students and staff, simulations for better surgery preparation, rehabilitation, and physical therapy exercises, remote surgery, and collaboration for better healthcare accessibility.
For medical imaging and diagnostics, AR enhances medical imaging by automating the process of highlighting areas of concern in real-time during scans. This can be particularly useful in procedures like ultrasound, where immediate decisions are crucial. Automated VR systems can interpret medical images, providing a 3D visualization of internal organs or tumors, which aids in more precise diagnostics and treatment planning.
The other treatment domains where AR/VR is extensively used are:
Despite data security, cost, accessibility, and technical issues that slows AR/VR implementation and development, the domain looks promising with the fast growing market value around the world.
Automation in the healthcare industry is enhanced by the use of connected medical devices. IoT and wearables improve treatment outcomes, improve medication management, allow early detection of chronic diseases, and eliminate distance limitations. The development of AI and sensors enables healthcare professionals to detect chronic health conditions and prevent major illnesses using smaller devices.
The IoT healthcare market reached $139,74 billion in 2023 and is expected to grow to $175,61 billion in 2024. The growth of the IoT market is driven by rising demand for connected medical devices and remote patient care. Additionally, the increase in geriatric patients and active patients with chronic disorders increased hospitalization and medical device use.
The wearable devices help patients track sleeping patterns, heart rate, and physical activity, adding value to healthy lifestyles and wellness. People become more informed about their health condition and may visit a doctor at the first signs of disease.
For healthcare organizations, IoT technologies connect MRI and CT scans directly to the computer (and analyze them with AI help), check air quality at the facility via sensors, track drug affectivity, and monitor patients' blood glucose levels, temperature, and blood pressure.
One of the restraints on IoT growth is internet disruptions, which may damage timely data delivery from the device to the app. Other potential pitfalls include poor cybersecurity, which may lead to medical data breaches, the rising cost of medical devices, and their complexity for elderly users.
Technologies continue to evolve. While AI development remains the main and fastest-growing domain worldwide, robotics and IoT growth keep pace. Below, you'll find bright, modern medical automation projects that aim to improve care through cutting-edge technologies.
In April 2023, Google released the Med-PaLM 2 large language model, an AI tool designed to assist healthcare professionals. It has been trained on a massive dataset of medical text and images. It allows Med-PaLM 2 to understand and generate human-quality text related to medical topics, such as summarizing patient records, answering questions about diagnoses and treatments, and generating draft research papers. Med-PaLM 2 is currently being evaluated in clinical trials and is expected to be available to healthcare professionals soon.
Robotic surgical systems make operations more precise and less invasive, contributing majorly to hospital automation. Since 1995, Da Vinci's robotic surgical systems have continued to extend surgeons' capabilities of surgeons' eyes and hands. The system translates the surgeon's hand movements to the instruments in real-time, bending and rotating them during the procedure. It provides highly magnified, 3D high-definition views of the surgical area, improving surgery precision. Today, more than 1 million surgical procedures are being carried out with the help of medical automation solutions.
This paragraph presents a constellation of promising projects in the baby care industry.
Cubo AI is a startup aiming to develop a smart baby monitoring system with an HD camera and sensors. The system tracks baby sleep patterns, measures room temperature and humidity, and makes photo and video recordings. A proactive warning system warns parents of dangers and sends rollover alerts. The startup is now turning the prototype into the final product.
Another example of modern automated baby care includes Happiest Baby. The company is an IoT startup that creates smart sleep solutions for babies. Their flagship product, Snoo, is a responsive baby bed that soothes infants with gentle rocking and white noise. The bed has sensors that detect a baby's movements and automatically adjust the rocking and white noise to help them fall back asleep.
As you can see, healthcare automation can be applied in various hospital departments and facilities, from surgery to baby care, administrative offices, and labs.
Despite fears that automation might lead to job losses among healthcare professionals, it does not. Healthcare automation optimizes costs and resources by fulfilling repetitive and manual tasks. It facilitates data processing and administrative tasks without removing people from the equation. The truth is that automation in healthcare will require workers to gain additional skills, re-training, and re-tooling to keep pace with the changing healthcare landscape.
Healthcare is a highly important domain that affects human lives. Any new tool, medicine, method, or technology must be thoroughly studied and tested for many years before implementation. You don't want a non-certified doctor to create your treatment plan, do you? The same goes for automation in healthcare. The testing time at least doubles for complex solutions like AI, which is now a supplementary tool for medical staff.
Medical automation is driven by the development of AI. It can facilitate healthcare decision-making by providing a 360-degree view of patient data, planning treatments, diagnosing diseases, reading MRI and CT scans, and predicting care outcomes. AI manages drug delivery, improves error detection and structure, and leverages health information.
Automation in healthcare opens opportunities for cutting manual tasks, workflow optimization, and better patient care for your healthcare organization. Modern technologies, such as artificial intelligence and robotic process automation, allow the processing of huge volumes of data and suggest suitable care schemes, check drug contraindications, and predict care outcomes.
Are you considering improvements for your clinic or hospital? If you need a custom healthcare software solution for your business, contact NEKLO to discuss your future project.
US-based and operating globally, NEKLO spearheads digital transformation initiatives for businesses worldwide. We deliver software solutions complying with your market and legislation.
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