Healthcare, like most industries, is seeking strategies to reduce operational costs. The healthcare industry is particularly attuned to this need due to long-standing financial pressures, which were further exacerbated by the pandemic.
Every day, we read about clinician staffing issues that lead to doctors and nurses leaving the industry due to administrative work that pulls them from their mission of patient care. Or about healthcare IT’s challenges in finding, hiring, and funding the talent necessary to keep facilities secure and running effectively. We also hear about healthcare’s reliance on manual administrative processes, which hampers efficiency. These processes include responding to referral requests in a timely manner, ensuring quick and efficient patient intake, completing insurance authorizations correctly, accurately coding patient charts for proper billing, and transmitting insurance paperwork efficiently to ensure prompt reimbursements.
Another significant yet often overlooked or underestimated area for improvement is print infrastructure. Print isn’t always associated with automation because it has been around for so long, but in healthcare, it plays a vital role in the workflow process. It directly impacts the workload of clinicians who rely on both electronic and paper-based information to treat their patients. IT departments’ workload is increased because they manage print devices and often provide incident response services. Administrative workers involved in revenue cycle management frequently depend on hard copy documents to perform their tasks. Additionally, print devices are critical access points for security and are often targeted by hackers due to insufficient security measures.
The reality is there are many ways for healthcare organizations to improve their current situation. Strategies such as augmenting IT staff with outsourced specialty personnel to reduce labor and ongoing training costs, implementing workflow automation technology to unburden admin workers of tedious work that prevents them from focusing on high value activities, or interoperability solutions that provide better communication and access to structured and unstructured data throughout the facility.
In the area of print, multi-functional devices (MFD) can act as a digital on ramp. With their ability to scan as well as copy, print and fax, these devices can provide a means for converting on premise and incoming print and faxed documents into structured, usable data that can be uploaded into your electronic health records (EHR), minimizing paper usage and errors, reducing labor costs and creating a central repository of all patient information. Information can also be shared with other facilities through the MFD’s Direct Secure Messaging (DSM) platform, ensuring safe, HIPAA compliant transport of data to the intended recipient. Additionally, management of these devices can be transitioned away from your IT department to the print provider by implementing a cloud-based print management platform eliminating the need to update drivers and servers, manage print queues, security settings, licenses, etc.
This all sounds great, however there must be a balance between transformation objectives and the investments needed to implement transformation. It’s easy to suggest that the right technology can solve all problems, but that’s not always the case. It’s not uncommon to invest in technology to drive improvements, only to discover later that the desired results weren’t achieved due to a lack of understanding of the size and scope of the issue, the additional internal resources needed to complete the project, or how the rest of the organization would be affected by the investment.
For example, healthcare organizations often operate at the departmental level, implementing solutions that are not integrated with the rest of the organization. While this may address an immediate issue for a specific department, it doesn’t help solve similar issues in other parts of the organization. This often leads to other departments purchasing their own solutions, which in turn can’t communicate with any of the other technologies, resulting in silos.
For C-suite executives, the pressing question is often, “How can we drive impactful organizational change?” Key areas of focus include sustainability, revenue generation, profit improvement, enhancing security and compliance, boosting administrative efficiency, ensuring billing accuracy, improving patient experience, addressing staffing shortages, and enhancing employee working conditions. These elements are essential for an optimally performing healthcare organization.
These are all real-world challenges, so the first step in achieving these results is to fully understand which challenges you are facing.
To gain insight into your current situation, begin by engaging a healthcare-focused technology provider to facilitate a Digital Transformation Readiness Workshop. This workshop should assess your existing IT, Information Management, Workflow Processes and Print operations to identify areas for improvement that resolve specific challenges.
After completing the workshop and pinpointing areas for improvement, the next step is to perform a thorough Health Check. This in-depth analysis of your operations will reveal any challenges within your current program and supply you with the essential information and data needed to create an efficient and effective future state model.
Finally, don’t settle for the status quo just because it’s familiar. Embracing modernization of your infrastructure can unlock significant benefits, driving efficiency and innovation. Ensure you’re addressing all critical aspects to fully capitalize on these opportunities.
Let Konica Minolta help get you started on your digitization journey.
