Health care workers have demanding jobs and the COVID-19 pandemic arguably exacerbated that reality. There’s no quick fix, but deploying automation at the workplace could relieve some of the pressure. Here are some fascinating ways automation technology can make meaningful improvements in the health care workflow.
1. Improve Note-Taking Efforts
Anyone who’s ever been a patient at a hospital or doctor’s office knows note-taking is a significant part of what health care workers do. They must create detailed accounts of patient complaints, physical characteristics, treatments, medications and more.
Many health care workers mention note-taking interferes with the time they can spend addressing patient needs. Most only have limited windows they can use for patient care and find taking notes consumes far more time than they’d like.
However, people have investigated how automation might help maintain the accuracy of patient notes while giving providers more time for other, more rewarding duties. In one instance, researchers built an automated system that grouped sentences into paragraphs and assigned appropriate headings. The results suggested such technology could save time and effort for health care workers who need to take patient notes.
Other solutions exist, such as those that listen to what’s happening in the nearby environment and make notes out of the detected sounds. In one case, researchers built an artificial intelligence (AI) automation tool that uses handwriting recognition, natural language processing and other technologies. It provides a more detailed picture of what happens during patient encounters.
Providers can then see and approve the automatically captured output. There’s also a feature that creates notes based on pieces of entered information. Then, health care workers spend less time entering details, but they can rest assured the patient information is complete.
2. Use Robots to Assist With Repetitive Tasks
Numerous studies indicate nurses are highly likely to experience stress and burnout. These professionals are vital to the well-being of society, but they’re under increasing pressure. That’s why decision-makers in the health care field have been exploring various solutions to help.
One possibility is to deploy robots that can take care of some of the repetitive parts of the work, such as transporting items. People at Jacksonville, Florida’s Baptist Medical Center now use a robot called Moxi that combines robotic process automation with AI. The machine can transport patient lab samples and even retrieve items people left at the front desk.
Organizational leaders believe Moxi’s deployment will help providers move away from many task-based duties towards a larger focus on care. Patients and visitors also love posing for selfies with the robot. That’s important, too, since some people have negative or uncertain opinions of robots and automation in general.
3. Rely on Decision-Support Systems
Health care professionals engage in numerous instances of life-and-death decision-making each day. Those occasions often require working with limited or incomplete information and making the best judgment calls based on the available details.
Automation won’t remove those challenges, but it could lessen them. In one example, health care workers overseeing people with severe mental illness used an automated system to help make more appropriate care decisions and prevent patient relapses.
One component of the system gives early alerts that patients may not be taking their medications as prescribed. Health care workers can then base their future interactions with those individuals on what the system shows.
The results indicated combining electronic health record data with an automated decision-support system is worthwhile. It may take clinicians some time to get used to doing things differently, but it could pay off by improving their workflows and patient outcomes.
4. Distribute Text Messages Through Automated Platforms
Patient communication is an integral part of what health care professionals do. Deploying the right communication strategies can help patients understand more about home care requirements, new medications they’re taking, the likely long-term outcomes of their situations and more.
Automated text messaging has emerged as a viable strategy for helping health care providers manage many of these communications more efficiently. After all, many patients are already accustomed to receiving text messages about other topics, so the format is not new or unfamiliar to them.
One study examined the outcomes of using automated text messages to check in with patients after surgeries. The results showed this approach improved those communications and led to higher nurse satisfaction rates.
People considering implementing this strategy must consider several factors. For example, some older patients may not feel comfortable receiving text messages or some individuals ignore unexpected text communications. Those limitations aside, automated texts could accelerate workflows.
Health Care Automation Is Worth Consideration
Not every health care task is well-suited to automation. However, these examples show it can work well when used thoughtfully and with clear purposes.
By Shannon Flynn, ReHack