The Importance of Workflow Automation in Healthcare

For healthcare companies, compliance, accuracy, and accountability are critical. With paper-based, manual workflow, providing the best outcomes is difficult. These processes often require a lot of human input, such as emails, pop-ins, meetings, calls, and instant messages. However, manual workflow management can lead to mistakes, long turnaround times, non-compliance, and other issues. No industry, especially healthcare, has time for these mistakes.

 

 

Automated workflow processes in healthcare provide better internal controls and greatly improved efficiency organization-wide. This article will cover what workflow management is, why it's critical for healthcare organizations, four use case examples that your organization would benefit from implementing, and two case studies from healthcare providers that benefited from workflow automation.

What is Workflow Management

Workflow management, or workflow automation, refers to the design, execution, and automation of processes based on workflow rules where human tasks, data, or files are routed between people or systems based on pre-defined business rules. Every company uses various workflows to ensure critical tasks are completed, and business goals are met. 

Why Workflow Management Is Critical for Healthcare Organizations

Automation is beneficial across all industries, especially healthcare. As discussed before, paper-based workflows can lead to mistakes, and in the healthcare industry, keeping patient files safe and secure is the utmost priority for HIPPA compliance. Did you know that at the beginning of 2020, 50% of healthcare workers and physicians suffered from burnout? This had a lot to do with the tedious, non-clinical tasks they were given (reporting, doc management, billing, etc.). With automation, you will avoid low-value work that often leads to burnout.

In a highly-regulated industry, complete data visibility for internal stakeholders and external agencies can save countless hours and dollars in regulatory compliance activity. Workflow automation can help healthcare organizations:

• Meet compliance and regulatory requirements
• Improve the workflow of approvals and documentation
• Provide workflow interoperability with other systems
• Reduce go-to-market cycles
• Improve internal audit controls
• Eliminate redundancies and consolidate internal services
• Route documentation and information securely for approval
• Standardize employee hiring and onboarding

Benefits of Workflow Automation

There are many benefits of implementing workflow automation. A top contender for the most significant benefit for the healthcare industry is ensuring 100% compliance. Integrify provides a consistent, secure, auditable workflow for any compliance system. As compliance regulations continue to increase in number and scope, the automation of compliance workflows has become critical. Other benefits of implementing automation include the following: 

• Greater efficiency
• Better internal controls
• Reduce risk
• Improved productivity
• Increased efficiency
• Gain a competitive advantage

You don't have time to struggle through manual, inefficient workflows. It's time to be quicker, more efficient, competitive, and employee-focused. It's time to automate your company's workflow. Check out these seven reasons to automate your workflow.

Specific Use Case Examples

Hospital facilities management

A building maintenance and facilities team gets tasked with everything from managing building security access to fixing HVAC issues. Handle these myriad requests in a centralized, consistent manner (instead of emails, phone calls, hallway conversations, etc.).

Employee onboarding, requests, and payroll

Easily streamline the hiring and onboarding process in your organization. Then post-hire, Integrify gives your employees a personalized online portal that they can use to submit requests for anything. Our customers often use this for HR and IT requests, including payroll adjustments, vacations, status changes, access/security requests, general information requests, and much more.

“When new employees need to be set up in the system, HR receives requests to set them up on payroll as well as complete other new employee paperwork. There is also a process through HR that allows managers to maintain performance notes and yearly review information. Getting new employees on board faster means our clients will get medical professionals ready to deliver care more quickly.”

– Tim Sahouri, CIO, Medcor.

Cybersecurity incident reporting

A centralized incident reporting system accessible to log incidents consistently and route them to experts for threat assessment is critical in the healthcare space.

Case Studies

Medcor

Medcor automated HQ and remote sites for healthy organizational growth.

GlaxoSmithKline

GSK improved the end-user experience to save time and money in the pharmaceutical market.

We understand workflow management for healthcare. Integrify got its start in it over twenty years ago. It’s a unique industry with its own challenges and regulations, but our experienced service and support team can ensure your workflow project is successful, on time, and within budget. Request a demo to see how we can help your organization reach its fullest potential and thrive.

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Other resources:

• Why Automation is Critical for Healthcare Finance Operations
• Internal Controls for Better Compliance
• Healthcare Workflow Management
• Workflow for Compliance
• Workflow for Healthcare

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