The Automation Economy is Revolutionising Healthcare

Nov 11,2023

The healthcare landscape is being reshaped by new technologies, innovative care practices, disruptive business models, and government regulations that arose during the recent pandemic. The World Health Organisationreported that over 90 per cent of countries faced disruption to their healthcare services from the pandemic. But beyond disruption of care, other challenges have included a staffing crisis, escalating costs, decreases in profitability, regulatory compliance, and increasing consumer demands.

These challenges apply in all healthcare systems around the world, Indiaincluded. With a population of 1.4 billion people, the demand for efficient healthcare services in India is enormous and only increasing. Universal healthcare is a key priority for India. To make healthcare accessible and affordable to all citizens, the government is working towards a robust digitalhealth infrastructure. At the same time, in the private sector, many forward-thinking healthcare organisations are seriously pursuing digital transformation in the wake of COVID and are embracing intelligent automation. They are finding that the broad spectrum of capabilities offered by intelligent automation addresses multiple critical needs across the healthcare enterprise, delivering cost savings, increased speed, productivity, and quality, higher service levels, and greater employee job satisfaction.

This is a harbinger of the Automation Economy, a period of radical mindset and behavioral shifts in which organisations across all industries are increasingly adopting automation as a core technology that powers their entire business and enables it to compete successfully in the 21st century. 

A combination of robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence(AI), intelligent automation (IA) is delivering tangible outsized returns to healthcare organisations. According to Accenture, almost half (48 per cent) of healthcare executives say they are using intelligent automation for IT tasks, and almost as many (47 per cent) are using it for client-facing processes. An essential building block, intelligent automation underpins and catalyses digital transformation in healthcare, enabling organisations to adapt, scale capacity, and respond to challenges throughout the healthcare value chain in the following ways

Intelligent automation enables the real-time monitoring of quality and regulatory protocols as well as patient clinical status. Additionally, it minimises the chances of human error, a significant contributor to morbidity and mortality.

Patients can benefit from automated appointment and medication reminders, medical alerts, AI-customised user interfaces, and financial assistance.

Telemedicine has revolutionised healthcare accessibility, allowing patients in rural areas to receive remote care from centrally located physicians and specialists. Intelligent automation plays a crucial role in this transformation by facilitating the swift setup and configuration of telemedicine sessions. It equips physicians with digital assistants to handle routine tasks like accessing databases, remote sensor data, and scheduling follow-up appointments. This seamless integration of technology ensures virtual connections between patients and providers are established accurately and reliably, with minimal burden on both parties. Also, as telemedicine incorporates an increasing number of remote sensors, their data outputs will require automated curation and validation. Intelligent automation can then efficiently add this data to patients' medical records, giving insight to physicians on the status of their patients at home.

Source: HealthWorld