Healthcare facilities and clinicians are often paid by the customers, government, or insurance providers. The primary healthcare system which is at the forefront of filling the universal healthcare needs is completely dependent on the government for payment.

Thus, the healthcare resources (administrative staff and doctors) are more focused on administrative work to facilitate communication between the government and healthcare facilities rather than patient care. The primary healthcare system needs more investment to implement innovative technologies such as AI-enabled healthcare process automation for better healthcare.

Healthcare professionals go through lengthy training and licensing. That’s the reason why the healthcare industry has a huge human resource demand and supply gap. Moreover, the demand for the healthcare workforce is changing with digitization but unlike other industries, the healthcare industry is already lacking resources making it hard to provide technology training to overworked staff so that they can seamlessly work with cutting edge technologies.

One-fits-all approach does not work in healthcare because every healthcare setting has different workflows in place. Thus, they need custom solutions to address their unique needs. For instance, there is a huge difference between hospital workflows and nursing home workflows. A genetic healthcare process automation solution does not work effectively in both cases.

What if the AI system gets wrong in predicting the medication, or fails to function in the middle of procedures; what if the faulty EHR delays the emergency procedures. Ultimately the result can be much worse; one can not put human life at stake due to machine fault. Therefore, implementing technology in healthcare needs high expertise.

Digital healthcare is facing compliance, regulatory, and legalization challenges, as gouging digital means complying with the HIPAA,GDPR, and other state or federal regulations. When a healthcare setting deploys an automation solution, it must carry out a compliance audit to validate compliance readiness.

Automation-driven healthcare recruitment, onboarding and staffing platforms for the HR department help teams to search for desired talent, simplify employee onboarding, staff scheduling, employee lifecycle management, performance metrics, human resource forecasting, skill tracking, time, and attendance management without putting in much effort and time.

The patient onboarding and discharge process include lots of approval as it often goes through the registration, billing, and insurance procedures. The traditional paper-based patient onboarding and discharge process were time-consuming making patients wait for long before admission or discharge.

With automation, the procedures of registration, billing, and insurance claims can be done in real-time and instant approval can be given for the patient admission or discharge using the mobile app.

Patients’ health records are highly sensitive. Making manual entry to the EHR is prone to human errors and can lead to patient injury.

Automation can help to securely transfer the test result to the patient, doctor, and insurer through authentication and authorization by storing the test information on the cloud leaving no room for data breaches and errors.

Hospitals must ensure the steady flow of drugs to the patient. With automation, hospitals can minimize the drug shortage. Automation helps to find expired medication in the inventory and replace it with new one, it also helps to improve the accuracy and efficiency of prescribed drug supply to the patient.

Automation-driven computer-assisted medical billing and coding systems can reduce the complexity of medical code diagnosis and treatment. The system leverages the EHR documents for billing health services, and an intelligent RPA platform can retrieve the data from EHR to supplement the claim form.

Automating the appointment scheduling process provides flexibility, reliability, and convenience to both customers and providers.

Allowing patients to schedule and reschedule their appointment through mobile apps or just a text message, getting pre-appointment reminders with instructions, getting appointment confirmation, and sending follow-up reminders, everything can be done by automating the patient appointment scheduling process.

Automation can’t fit into the bigger picture for the healthcare system. Like Tesla cars, we can’t keep our healthcare system on autopilot. Machines require human assistance to make complex decisions because only humans have that panoramic view and analytical capabilities to choose between right and wrong.

Though the experts predict that more than 80% of the human interaction in healthcare can be handled with automation and AI-assisted response systems, people are still not convinced with the automated responses and seek human interaction while consulting.

As one can not put human life at stake with complete dependence on automated systems, human support is critical in healthcare.

So, we can conclude that automation is best to improve healthcare efficiencies and support everyone in the ecosystem to deliver the best but there must be humans in the loop for high-level decision making and high engagement with the patients.