The global healthcare market is buried in data. The direct result is a patient interaction that suffers due to an inability to access data within the context needed to make it useful for positive patient outcomes. Healthcare technology spend for 2020 must focus on context-enabled solutions to acquire data and make it useful to knowledge workers.
Organizations have been using some form of automation for a couple of decades now. Many organizations using RPA tools have mastered automating repetitive tasks such as sending files between systems or rote data entry.
Moving beyond steps in a process we can also enable actual process improvement that empowers hospitals and health systems to reconfigure business processes that aren’t working and create new opportunities with new business processes. What are the results? Elimination of costly manual, paper-driven work that does not add value, while creating revenue-generating automation that not only improves quality and productivity but enables profitability.
Healthcare organizations have fallen behind in adopting technology advancements but with challenges to the Affordable Care Act and increasing regulatory demands, we’re now seeing hospitals and healthcare companies taking advantage of automation to perform very complex tasks. Pulling together mountains of financial data from different technology, decentralized systems and scanning documents is now taking hours or minutes instead of days and weeks. Automating transactions that are buried in paper, such as invoice processing and patient records, is transforming how healthcare organizations run their businesses and, at the same time, improves business operations, clinical care and the patient experience.
Hospitals and clinics still rely on paper to perform many functions. Purchase requisitions are still being passed around in intercompany mail in a manila envelope. Processes that are still running on paper are out of control and not auditable – one never knows for certain where that paper is, who made changes, and where it’s headed to next. Paper gets handled several times and the more hands that touch a process, the more mistakes that are made and the slower the process runs.
If we remove paper from the entire process, automated document workflows can free up knowledge workers to perform more important jobs. In healthcare, that means workers who were walking the floors looking for paper documents and purchase requisitions can spend more time at the bedside caring for patients. Once paper documents are turned into electronic files and the data is unlocked, siloes are knocked down as data flows where it needs to from department to department. From finance to human resource processes, health systems are using software automation to move data across the organization.
Infor and Ephesoft partner together to drive software automation through a combined technology solution called Infor Document Management (IDM) Capture. By blending interoperability with data science you can build business processes that organize workflows according to business rules. This all starts with getting the right data into your systems and this is where the partnership was built. We help companies transition to a more efficient, paper-free system. Software automation helps organizations take that critical step away from paper-based, manual processes and create effective, standardized practices.
The goal we are realizing together is that people don’t need to be involved in many task-based processes except to review exceptions to the rules. Our customers recognize that it’s important to work with partners with a comprehensive vision for automation along with the ability to leverage interoperability and robust data science. IDM Capture and CloudSuite Financials fill that prescription.
