5 Popular Healthcare Workflows for Better Healthcare Management

What is Healthcare Workflow Management?

Healthcare workflow management is the process of automating a series of tasks in the healthcare space for improved efficiency, streamlined value delivery, and patient care. These tasks may range from outpatient management, appointment management, approvals, consultations, admissions, billing, claims, etc.

Healthcare management is no simple task.

There are many processes involved, such as managing finances, staff, patients, legal issues, logistics, inventory, and more. It can all get a little overwhelming–especially when each of them are done by hand. Healthcare data is so sensitive that many managers think that using automation as a part of healthcare workflow management is not even an option.

But if you haven’t considered what automation can do lately, it’s time to see how much you’ve been missing.

What is a claim processing workflow?

Claims processing is an integral part of the healthcare process. A claims processing workflow helps insurance companies sieve through submitted claims, validate them, gain approvals, document acceptance or denial, and process payments as quickly as possible.

To illustrate how effective healthcare workflows can be, we’ve taken a closer look at five common healthcare processes that should be automated to move your healthcare workflow management a notch ahead.

Below are the 5 popular healthcare workflows to boost efficiency:

1. Approvals for Patient Admissions and Discharges

In the average healthcare institution, a number of patients move in and out on any given day. Their physical conditions and other details may vary, but from the hospital’s perspective, there’s one common, crucial factor: approvals.

Patients are often stuck with unnecessary delays, waiting for the right doctor to receive the paperwork and sign off on an admission or a discharge.

Automated workflows can get approvals done in real-time. This means that doctors can use mobile apps to approve patient discharge requests on the go. Another advantage is that approvals like this can’t be easily faked, and hospitals will have a permanent time-stamped record of each approval.

2. Allocating Medication

Medicine reaching the wrong hands simply because of human error is an all-too-common issue at hospitals around the world. Whether it’s due to errors in handwritten notes or just dealing with the sheer volume, errors in allocating medication are bound to happen with manual processes.

With an automated process, you can ensure that physicians digitally select the right medication so it is clear to everyone in the workflow, and there is a clear audit of who has seen and approved the medication, ensuring the right medicines reach the right patients, and always on time.

3. Running Patient Surveys

The healthcare industry has grown beyond just performing surgeries and passing out medicine. Bedside manners, extra amenities, and holistic patient care are no longer nice-to-haves, but a core offering of any healthcare workflow.

Patient surveys are the best way of ascertaining that the healthcare you provide was satisfactory. Done the traditional way, these surveys are barely more than a lukewarm, token effort with the surveyor and the patient going through the motions, both looking to complete the formality as soon as possible.

That’s why you need to run these surveys through a healthcare workflow management system, which ensures that a proper survey is carried out at the appropriate time, and the data actually goes to someone who can do something about it!

4. Maintaining Adequate Medical Documentation

Very few healthcare organizations have medical records that are updated comprehensively by every doctor who ever treated you, and understood comprehensively by every subsequent doctor who looks at them.

For the most part, adequate medical documentation is a struggle to achieve.

Take the recent push for mental healthcare to be linked to your primary physician–with both worlds coming together to provide the best care for issues like depression. Medical records need to be impeccable, which is far from the case in real life.

The automation of documentation will mean that medical records are consistently updated, with the doctor’s computer ensuring that they enter treatment details every single time. Coupling that with a cloud database makes all your files safe and accessible from anywhere you need them.

5. The Admission Carousel

Patients at busy hospitals often get turfed from department to department. Admission is often a process that requires the patient to go from desk to desk–this is obviously a painful process for someone who might already be in pain!

Automating this can:

• Save the hospital precious time

• Improve the patient’s experience, and get them treatment quickly

• Make the hospital run smoothly and efficiently

Everyone Wants More Efficiency

You can’t ignore the efficiency that automation software can bring to healthcare. By getting organized and streamlined, hospitals and healthcare organizations can reduce hospitalization, hospital stays, and overall costs.

Think your healthcare could with a boost inefficiency? It’s time to turn to automated healthcare workflow management.

Sign up for a customizable demo and revel in the difference.