Manufacturing operations are not just what happens in the factory. You have to consider what’s happening on the floor with your contractors and out in the field with your tech workers. Streamlining your manufacturing production line doesn’t necessarily mean using everything to do with automation. In fact, it’s about high performance equipment, but it’s also simple as applying the right manufacturing operations to the production line to minimize waste. Wasted time. Wasted materials. Wasted revenue, wasted orders, all of these things can be prevented and streamlined so that your business is running effectively. You need to be able to track things easily and make sure that they are going out on time.

You also need to ensure that quality standards are met and this is a good place to start your journey with the right service management software. You can ensure that people on the floor and your customers on the ground feel like your business is one that is stable and solid. You have to have the right strategy to make sure that your business is a positive and successful one and with the right software you can get there faster. Looking at what your consumers want and what your employees need so that you can make the best decisions for your business. Your manufacturing business will be a success, but only if you are looking at how you can streamline the operations effectively. Let’s take a look at how you can streamline your manufacturing operations so that everything works exactly the way you expected it to.

• Product line performance. The first place to begin is to check your product line and whether it’s performing correctly.If you have an underperforming product line, then this is the best place to begin with your streamlining operation. Products will then be already facing problems from the fulfillment of those products to quality. You need to make sure that this is a good place for your business to start. When you are examining an underperforming product, you have to be able to focus on more than what you can control directly. You have to examine the production lifecycle to see whether the floors lay there or if it’s with the product itself.
• Know what to track. Being able to define effective KPIs is important to streamline your operations management. When you have the right metrics and KPIs in place, you’ll know what is and isn’t correct to track. Not all information from your business will be useful to help you to meet your company goals. Resist the urge to track all of the KPIs and metrics, but focus on the ones that are most relevant for your business in the first place.
• Start capturing machine level data. Have you heard of Manufacturing Execution Systems? These are applications that will monitor and track as well as control the activities on the factory floor of your business. This will be effective at helping you to streamline your manufacturing operations, and they are useful for capturing the machine level data that you need, such as the effectiveness of your equipment overall and the aggregate, precise and accurate data on the whole product life cycle. This can happen in real time as well, which will help you to track exactly what you need to track when you need to track it.
• Hire correctly. If you want to streamline your manufacturing operations, you need to hire the right people. You need the right tech people on the ground doing the work that you need them to do, and that takes time to find the right people. This is not a process that you should rush, and from here you can make sure that you have the right software to monitor where your technicians are at any given time. You need to ensure that people feel comfortable and engaged, so it’s vital that you take the right steps to do your hiring process some justice. 
• Test your systems. As you make changes to your manufacturing process, test the systems to make sure that they are working for you. There’s no use of running a manufacturing streamlining process if you can’t make sure it’s definitely working the way that you need it to be working. Develop and test any integration systems that connect all of your data points. Having one centralized processing management system can ensure that you are able to keep things running as smoothly as possible.
• Continue to work on communicating. One of the biggest steps that you need to take in order to streamline your manufacturing operation is to communicate with those around you. Communicating with senior management is vital to ensure that you are all on the same page. There is no denying the importance of engaging your workers from every level on the company ladder, but by engaging your senior management team, you can ensure that the right people are playing the right roles across all projects. From communicator to Liaison to advocator, you can ensure that you have the right support across the business from the beginning. This will help to streamline all manufacturing operations and ensure everybody knows where they fall in the company manufacturing lifecycle.
• Gather data from all teams. Across your manufacturing business, there are going to be certain levels of data that you need more than others. Continuing to gather this data is going to help you in order to streamline each process every step of the way, you need to know that those in the processing department are liaising with the production department and then dispatch onwards needs to be communicating as well. A modern manufacturing industry contains demands that decisions be made based on accurate delivered data. There should be timely, especially where streamlining manufacturing operations is concerned.If you don’t do this, you’re going to struggle to keep things moving forward.
• Get everybody involved. One of the mainstays of a good manufacturing operations management strategy is having accurate access to precise and real time data. Once you start outputting that data constantly, you need to then be able to move on past the basics and incorporate intelligence strategies into a company wide operations management system. When you get everybody involved in this and everybody is on the same team, teamwork is far more accurate and is able to occur much faster.
• Keep planning ahead. When it comes to integration through automation apps and manufacturing systems, you need to continue to plan ahead. Integrating all of your systems so that everything is running smoothly will help to streamline your manufacturing Process.
• Have a timeline for a strategy launch. To stay on top of your progress, you need to ensure that you have a good timeline for launching your new strategy. By keeping everybody in the loop, you are ensuring that your operations management applies all of the insights that were learned from the pilot data. You can then push your data-driven strategies to ensure that everybody is on the same page where they should be. You should be aware, though, that your progress will hinge on whether or not you can aggregate the data effectively and push your strategy forward in a way that makes sense for everybody on board. You need to be able to use your data to inform future decisions and once you complete the pilot you can then apply that strategy company wide. This will lead to a much more straightforward process in the end, and your business will be more successful as a result. Without this strategy in place, you’re going to find it difficult to manage pushing forward where you’re looking to push forward. It is therefore important that you are monitoring your strategies from the very beginning.

With the right management systems, you can ensure that any strategies that you put into play are continuing to run effectively and smoothly. You do not need to worry that your strategy won’t play out because you will know that in real time you have put all of the data into place to ensure that you shouldn’t be able to trip up. By enhancing your machine to machine communication and making sure that you share data organization wide, you will be in a strong position to improve your profits and maximize your efficiency. This is something you’ll see will foster innovation and improve the quality of your business. Ultimately, this streamlines your operational management in a way that nothing else can.

• Continue to work on communicating. One of the biggest steps that you need to take in order to streamline your manufacturing operation is to communicate with those around you. Communicating with senior management is vital to ensure that you are all on the same page. There is no denying the importance of engaging your workers from every level on the company ladder, but by engaging your senior management team, you can ensure that the right people are playing the right roles across all projects. From communicator to Liaison to advocator, you can ensure that you have the right support across the business from the beginning. This will help to streamline all manufacturing operations and ensure everybody knows where they fall in the company manufacturing lifecycle.
• Gather data from all teams. Across your manufacturing business, there are going to be certain levels of data that you need more than others. Continuing to gather this data is going to help you in order to streamline each process every step of the way, you need to know that those in the processing department are liaising with the production department and then dispatch onwards needs to be communicating as well. A modern manufacturing industry contains demands that decisions be made based on accurate delivered data. There should be timely, especially where streamlining manufacturing operations is concerned.If you don’t do this, you’re going to struggle to keep things moving forward.
• Get everybody involved. One of the mainstays of a good manufacturing operations management strategy is having accurate access to precise and real time data. Once you start outputting that data constantly, you need to then be able to move on past the basics and incorporate intelligence strategies into a company wide operations management system. When you get everybody involved in this and everybody is on the same team, teamwork is far more accurate and is able to occur much faster.
• Keep planning ahead. When it comes to integration through automation apps and manufacturing systems, you need to continue to plan ahead. Integrating all of your systems so that everything is running smoothly will help to streamline your manufacturing Process.
• Have a timeline for a strategy launch. To stay on top of your progress, you need to ensure that you have a good timeline for launching your new strategy. By keeping everybody in the loop, you are ensuring that your operations management applies all of the insights that were learned from the pilot data. You can then push your data-driven strategies to ensure that everybody is on the same page where they should be. You should be aware, though, that your progress will hinge on whether or not you can aggregate the data effectively and push your strategy forward in a way that makes sense for everybody on board. You need to be able to use your data to inform future decisions and once you complete the pilot you can then apply that strategy company wide. This will lead to a much more straightforward process in the end, and your business will be more successful as a result. Without this strategy in place, you’re going to find it difficult to manage pushing forward where you’re looking to push forward. It is therefore important that you are monitoring your strategies from the very beginning.

With the right management systems, you can ensure that any strategies that you put into play are continuing to run effectively and smoothly. You do not need to worry that your strategy won’t play out because you will know that in real time you have put all of the data into place to ensure that you shouldn’t be able to trip up. By enhancing your machine to machine communication and making sure that you share data organization wide, you will be in a strong position to improve your profits and maximize your efficiency. This is something you’ll see will foster innovation and improve the quality of your business. Ultimately, this streamlines your operational management in a way that nothing else can.

The post Steps to Take to Streamline Manufacturing Operations appeared first on .

Roughly 50% of all medical professionals today report feeling burnt out. That burnout is severe enough to lead 41% of nurses and 32.6% of nonclinical staff to consider leaving their jobs. These levels are both higher than in other industries and have more severe consequences, as staff availability can impact patient care. Thankfully, technology can reduce this stress.

Automate Administrative Tasks

The most important way technology impacts staff retention is through automation. While many people think of automation as taking jobs away from people, in this scenario, it makes humans’ roles easier instead of replacing them.

Over 60% of health care professionals cite having too many bureaucratic tasks as their leading cause of burnout. More than one-third cite too many work hours. Consequently, if hospitals reduced their administrative burden through robotic process automation (RPA) and AI, they’d address the most significant causes of staff turnover.

Repetitive, data-heavy tasks like documentation, scheduling and data entry take a considerable amount of employees’ time and are not engaging. However, they’re also among the most easily automatable workflows. Assigning these tasks to RPA and AI solutions gives medical employees more time to spend on work they care more about, preventing burnout.

Streamline Compliance

Similarly, new technologies can streamline regulatory compliance to give employees more time with patients. Tools like blockchain platforms and cloud computing offer easier, more efficient alternatives to traditional regulatory workflows so staff can adhere to industry standards without “click fatigue.”

Many professionals cite difficulty managing EHRs, and increasing cybersecurity risks and regulations may exacerbate these concerns. Because blockchains provide an immutable audit trail, enable easier collaboration and enact instant transactions, they’re a better alternative. Using a blockchain EHR management system lets doctors and nurses pull up or file records with less confusion and clicking, preventing EHR-related exhaustion.

Similarly, automated tools can analyse workflows and documents for potential regulatory issues to enable faster audits. That way, adhering to industry regulations doesn’t detract from time treating the patients these rules intend to protect.

Recognise and Reward Top Performers

Of course, burnout and turnover stem from more than just complicated workflows. Feeling unappreciated is another common reason behind staff churn, but technology can help address this issue, too.

Productivity tracking tools and cloud reporting platforms enable easier feedback loops about employee performance. Leaders can then point to hard data to identify top performers to publicly recognize and reward. These rewards can come in the form of cash bonuses, extra vacation time or similar incentives, which digital platforms also make easier to distribute.

This recognition is a seemingly small step but an impactful one. Studies find that health care workers are 3.9 times more likely to feel connected to their company culture if their organization recognizes teams’ good performance. Those feelings of connectedness translate into increased engagement, preventing turnover.

Enable Flexible Work

Flexible work arrangements can also help improve retention. When employees can work remotely, they tend to be more engaged, less stressed and even more productive. Enabling hybrid work has historically been impossible in the health care industry, but new technology changes that.

Telehealth platforms have gained popularity as a way to let patients seek remote care, but that remote access goes both ways. These tools also let medical professionals see and manage important patient information without having to be in the hospital or office. Cloud collaboration tools bring the same remote connectivity to internal business functions.

Not every health care workflow is possible to perform remotely, so creating a 100% remote medical workforce isn’t feasible. However, some employees can perform some of their work remotely, so creating space for hybrid work where possible will improve retention within the industry.

Optimise Hiring and Onboarding

Health care organisations can also improve staff retention before hiring even takes place. Better candidate selection processes can minimize the risks of turnover down the road, and technology provides the optimal path forward.

AI can parse resumes to find applicants or reach out to ideal candidates who haven’t applied to highlight people who are most likely to be a good fit for the company. By matching recruits to roles they’re more qualified for and more likely to enjoy, medical organizations can minimize burnout from a workplace failing to meet employees’ expectations.

AI recruiting and onboarding tools also shorten and ease the process. Long recruiting processes are the number one reason for negative hiring experiences, which hinder employee engagement in the long run. Consequently, by streamlining this phase with AI, health care businesses ensure they don’t promote turnover from the beginning.

Technology Is Crucial to Healthcare Staff Retention

The healthcare industry must address staff retention to meet patients’ needs and maintain productivity. To do that, it must embrace technologies like AI, RPA, blockchain and the cloud.

If medical organizations follow these steps, they can vastly improve employee management, preventing burnout and turnover. These measures may only be part of the path to improved healthcare staff retention, but they are important ones.

By Devin Partida, Rehack

The post How to Increase Health Care Staff Retention with Technology appeared first on .

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

The post 4 Ways to Support Health Care Workers With Automation Technology appeared first on .

In nursing and midwifery alone, more than 27,000 professionals left the Nursing & Midwifery Council register in 2021-22, a 13% increase on the year before. What’s concerning about those leaving is the reasons they cited: too much pressure and poor workplace culture, increased workloads and a lack of staff were all issues highlighted.

The result is that delivery of services is becoming harder. That’s the same for any employer that loses talented employees; with a provider like the NHS, being unable to deliver services has a direct impact on the Patient Outcomes. Delays for appointments, diagnosis and treatment get longer, which in turn means the eventual cost for curing patients increases.

So, what’s the answer? Effectively, there are two options.

One is to hire more people: replace those that have left, and then hire more to alleviate the pressures that were causing staff to exit in the first place.

There are several problems with this. First, new hires take time to reach full productivity. Those brought in as replacements will not be able to hit the ground running; nor will the new employees that are coming in to help with taking some of the strain. And while over time the problem may solve itself, there will be a period where things will get worse. It’s a bit like trying to patch a leaky bucket while still filling it with water; you’ll fix the bucket eventually, but you’ll lose quite a bit of water before it’s all sorted.

Second, there are budgets to consider. There simply isn’t the money to increase the size of the NHS workforce in that way.

Finally, you must be able to find people to hire them. We’re still in the midst of the Great Resignation. There isn’t a single industry in the UK that doesn’t have a hiring problem, and candidates have all the power. Why would people choose to work in healthcare when other industries offer better pay and working conditions?

So, that’s one option discounted. What’s the other? Automation.

Automation in the NHS

There is a significant opportunity to look at the daily work of NHS employees and identify areas which can be automated, to free them up to focus on more valuable activities. For medical staff, that means more patient time; for administrative teams, that might be being able to deliver services more effectively, and not bogged down in paperwork.

Portsmouth Hospital University Trust has seen benefits for their NHS staff as much as their patients. By removing some of the repetitive workload from their clinicians, they can conserve their energy for work that is suited to critical clinical engagement such as more complex decision-making and empathy.

From handling lab results to referrals, sharing reports securely to shift planning, there are significant opportunities to optimise the delivery of services while improving both the standard of care and workload pressures. Plus, human error and inaccuracies can be cut dramatically.

PSTG, a technology company, has seen Intelligent Automation provide major NHS Trusts with cost effective tools for absorbing high volume work, seeing the adoption of technology used in more clinical and high urgency departments.

As the NHS looks for ways to continue to deliver high quality care at a time of workforce flux, automation offers a way to not only cover the gaps left by exiting employees but improve working conditions and enable a better standard of patient service. The UK’s healthcare workforce is already working within limited time constraints. By outsourcing certain tasks to automation, clinicians and administrators can focus on patient safety and improving the service they deliver.

By Leon Stafford, Country Manager, Digital Workforce

The post How Automation can Improve Employee Experience and Retention in the NHS appeared first on .

And it is expected to do all this on limited, and now reduced, budgets. Indeed, the news that an already resource-strapped NHS could well have to incorporate significant budget cuts could not come at such a crucial time.

Alleviating pressure using automation

Yet, while these challenges may seem insurmountable, some of the solutions may be closer at hand. While there is no single silver bullet that will fix every single challenge, there are tools, processes and approaches available that, if deployed correctly, could not only help alleviate some of the pressures the NHS is dealing with, but lay the groundwork to future-proof against further potential problems yet to appear.

The 21st century has been defined by the increasingly rapid adoption of digital technology. When deployed effectively, organisations have been able to upend old ways of working to deliver better results faster. One of the key elements of this progression is the automation of certain functions and tasks.

However, other industries have adopted these technologies and new ways of working reaping the rewards of stellar advancement, health continues to lag. This is partly due to regulatory restrictions, and partly down to a degree of conservatism within the sector in addressing new ways of working.

Alleviating employees to focus on complex problems and tasks

The result is that many highly skilled and in demand clinicians still spend time performing tasks that could be handed to non-clinical staff, who in turn could see more of their current workload automated. For instance, the UK government estimates that a third of a community-based clinician’s time (the equivalent of 88 days per working year) is spent on administration and patient coordination, while over half of doctors report that at least one hour of their work each day could be carried out by non-clinical staff.

What would happen if that time was able to progress one step further? With the administrative tasks shifted from clinician to non-clinician, and the latter’s current tasks moving from human to automation. Based on the above findings, if that approach were to be deployed at a community clinic, it would only need to be applied to three clinicians’ workloads for that location to have the equivalent of a fourth clinician available to care for patients.

Suddenly, more care can be dispensed, in whatever form the clinic decrees most beneficial to its patients, while non-clinical staff can tackle more complex problems. Workloads can be managed more effectively, helping to improve staff engagement, morale and, in the long run, contributing to reduce the flood of workers currently leaving the health sector.

Automation in action

University Hospitals of North Midlands (UHNM) uses robotic process automation (RPA) to support patients in selecting their own X-ray appointments. Pre-pandemic, the imaging department scanned more than 9000 patients every week across X-ray, ultrasound, MRI and other specialities. With COVID restrictions impacting the number of services it can run, the department is now using RPA to speed up the appointment process and alleviate pressure on staff without impacting the service it delivers to patients.

The RPA mimics human actions on the hospital’s digital appointments system and sends a short text message to the patient’s mobile phone with a unique web browser link where they can select their preferred imaging location and date and time for an appointment. The RPA automatically assigns an appointment based on preferences selected, handing control over to the patient. It also considers where different medical scans can be carried out at different imaging centres, the patient’s age and the necessary time that will be required for an appointment.

As well as allowing patients to control when and where they have their appointments (and thereby reducing the risk of missed appointments), the system also means that the imaging department receives accurate information on what imaging is required. This allows it to manage patient throughput and reduce waiting times.

From better appointment scheduling to reducing NHS pressure

The result, across the board, is a more enhanced level of service, with a shorter gap between referral and imaging, contributing to more opportunities to identify patient illness and implement a care plan sooner, increasing patient safety through a more efficient process.

The UHNM RPA deployment is a good example of how one example of automation to manage appointments – can contribute to a better overall care service. In doing so, it helps to ease some of the pressure the NHS is facing and allows them to meet the demands of delivering the highest levels of care possible within the realms of constrained and threatened budgets.

By Leon Stafford, UK country manager at Digital Workforce

The post Using Automation to Tackle Budget-restricted Delivery of NHS Services appeared first on .

The most cutting-edge healthcare issues demand the attention of the decision-makers from the whole value chain of the industry. During two days of intensive networking, worldwide experts of health digitalization raised topics about healthcare data management, software for clinical and laboratory settings, and case studies of healthcare digital transformation. Among participating companies were Lundbeck, Roche, Novartis, Abbott, Pfizer, Clinic Saint-Jean in Brussels, Oxford University Hospitals.

The business program of AUTOMA+ Healthcare was divided into sessions, panel discussions, and roundtables. There were presented more than 45 case studies from digital health experts.

The first day of the Congress started with the executive opening panel that comprised presentations of CEOs, CIOs, and CDOs of leading healthcare providers. The viewpoint on healthcare business transformation and value-based health systems was shared by Klinikum Braunschweig, University Hospital Center of São João, University Medicine Greifswald, and datango. Moreover, healthcare organizations presented the way to collect, analyse, and protect patient information to improve health outcomes and support transition from volume to value.

The second day of the Congress was dedicated to better customer experience and processes improvement with AI, its usage in genomics diagnostics, and its influence on preventive medicine. Besides, the start-ups had the opportunity to meet leaders of the health industry and present the latest healthcare technologies and solutions. There were introduced smart wearables & AI, a digital self-management tool, and a digital health assistant.

Healthcare Automation and Digitalization Congress is the networking platform for more than 250 professionals from healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies, healthcare professionals, IT and project managers, and heads from technology companies. It is a place for experts to share their cases, exhibitors to showcase their solutions, and industry representatives to discuss healthcare trends at the same venue.

The registration to the next edition of the Congress is already open. To get more information about the AUTOMA+ 2022, please follow the link: https://bit.ly/3kRKiaJ

The post Healthcare: Digitalization & Automation Trends appeared first on .