How Automation Can Help Ease Healthcare Worker Burnout

With rising staffing shortages and burnout among healthcare workers, digital transformation will be key to overcoming these challenges and protecting patient care. It’s estimated that the U.S. could see a shortage of up to 124,000 physicians by 2033 and will need to hire at least 200,000 nurses per year to meet increased demand and to replace retiring nurses. The healthcare worker burnout crisis in this country began before the COVID-19 pandemic, but the public health emergency made the situation even worse as frontline health workers risked their lives to service others.

The pandemic accelerated the need for digitalization across industries, including healthcare. This was critical to delivering healthcare to patients who could not leave their homes due to various lockdown restrictions, forcing patients and clinicians to become more accepting of telemedicine. 

Emergency rooms throughout the U.S. are overwhelmed by long wait times. Resource strain combined with the legacy infrastructures still being used in most health organizations have only added to these challenges. Tack on tightening regulatory procedures and you’re left with a healthcare system that is struggling.

How Artificial Intelligence and Other Tech can Help 

Even when it comes to electronic health records (EHRs), an area where many countries are making strides, the issue of interoperability remains. This precludes the effective, timely, and secure transmission of patient data. While most health executives recognize the long-term benefits of digital transformation, many struggle with how to get started while under immense resource strain. For example, while the UK and Scandinavian countries are using digitization to help with margin pressures, the US and Australia are letting such pressures curtail the adoption of new technologies.

Intelligent automation (IA) has the potential to fill these gaps, unburdening healthcare workers so they can focus on the human side of healthcare, streamlining administrative tasks, improving patient access to care, enhancing patient engagement and experience, and enabling collaboration between healthcare professionals and organizations. 

IA is a combination of artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA), business process management (BPM), and other complementary technologies that enable companies to advance workflows and streamline end-to-end processes. Digital workers can do routine administrative tasks, such as appointment scheduling, claims processing, and data entry. This frees up healthcare professionals to focus on complex, higher-value tasks, like patient care and research. Digital workers can operate 24/7, minimize errors and improve efficiencies by replacing manual processes. Again, that relieves overworked healthcare personnel from having to do these repetitive tasks. 

AI and machine learning (ML) can analyze large amounts of healthcare data to uncover patterns and insights that can inform decision-making. For example, ML algorithms can help identify patients who are at high risk for certain conditions, allowing healthcare providers to intervene earlier and potentially prevent more serious health issues as well as save costs and time down the line. These technologies can also be used to develop predictive models for hospital readmissions, disease progression, and patient outcomes, allowing providers to deliver more personalized care and improve outcomes.

BPM can help healthcare organizations streamline and coordinate their processes, reducing the time and resources required to perform routine tasks. BPM can also help healthcare organizations identify and eliminate bottlenecks in their processes, allowing them to operate more efficiently and effectively in the long-term. This also saves costs and time. But how do health organizations optimize their digital transformation journey?

Build a Business Case 

Stakeholders need to “buy in” to a digital transformation strategy and for that to happen, you need to clearly define your vision and the benefits of automation. Begin with a basic introduction, describing the proposed vision and accompanying benefits. From here, key questions should be addressed: What happens if you do nothing? What are the different possible procurement pathways? Are there multiple deployment options? 

It’s important to convey what defines success and how it will be achieved. Longer-term plans should be a part of the equation. How will the proposed solution be procured? Make sure to consider regulations and policies. Information on license costs, projected revenue savings, and proposed returns on investments should be modeled. 

While this all may seem daunting to put together, when taken step-by-step and with the advice of experts – it becomes achievable.  

Devising and following a strategic plan for digital transformation is the difference between true transformation and short-term wins. 

Step 1: Decide What to Automate

This is one of the most important steps. Organizations seem to be best off when they begin with simple, yet high-volume tasks involving multiple people. 

By starting with easier wins, you’re able to more easily get people on board through quantifiable proof points of the benefits of digitalization. Cultural adoption is crucial to success, so it’s important to get people involved in goal and roadmap structuring early on. This helps foster an automation-first culture.

Once you’ve identified the opportunities you want to automate, study these processes and consider limitations and workarounds. Understanding processes before automating them is essential. Process intelligence can be especially helpful here since healthcare organizations tend to operate across multiple systems that sit within interoperable siloes. Process mining software can process system-level data to uncover the best tasks to automate, factoring insights and hidden steps that manual assessment can miss. This helps organizations better overcome the inherent limitations of any existing systems.

Step 2: Process Automation Needs Oversight 

To successfully deploy process automation, executive sponsorship is important. Transparency across the business is essential to garner the support and credibility needed to onboard the entire organization. This is key because automation success will collapse without the support of entire teams. 

Team members should know their roles and responsibilities. They should have a clear understanding of how digital workers will impact them, including direct benefits. 

Your developers, engineers, and consultants play an instrumental role in developing and deploying your automation infrastructure. It can be helpful to establish a center of excellence (CoE) to oversee the digital transformation journey, ensuring that actions align with overall strategic objectives and are within regulatory and governance frameworks. 

Step 3: Managing the Plan with Opportunities to Scale  

At this point, you should have an on-board work environment and the systems needed for success in place. It’s important the establishment of an ongoing operating model, which should include several factors: a long-term strategy that includes scaling plans, clear roles, needed skills – using education and training to fill any gaps, governance measures, and best practices.

Devising and following a strategic plan for digital transformation is the difference between true transformation and short-term wins. Once you have deployed your automations, digital transformation is not complete – it’s an ongoing journey that requires a robust and agile infrastructure, combined with a culture of automation, and leaders to manage the change. 

About Anna Twomey