By Dr Yan Chow
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 Organisation reported 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, India included. 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 digital health 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.
Noticeable Impact Across the Healthcare Value Chain
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:
- Improving quality of care and patient outcomes: 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.
- Improving the patient care experience: Patients can benefit from automated appointment and medication reminders, medical alerts, AI-customised user interfaces, and financial assistance.
- Improving access to care: 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.
- Reducing compliance risk: Role-based access controls enabled by intelligent automation help guarantee that patient data remains secure from unauthorized access. The meticulous and comprehensive data collected by digital workers/software bots include user identity, permission, decisions and actions, and outcomes. This level of granularity greatly simplifies compliance with regulatory audits and other requests for specific data or reports.
- Boosting morale and productivity: Intelligent automation relieves healthcare workers of meaningless repetitive tasks, enabling them to focus on more productive and higher-value work, such as patient care. Currently, healthcare professionals’ duties are extensive, extending beyond providing medical care to many other nonmedical tasks, such as managing labor shortages and complying with new regulations. Digital assistants and AI tools can support India’s already overwhelmed healthcare workforce by taking on much of their cognitive load and helping them to make better decisions based on data.
Arriving at the Future of Healthcare with Intelligent Automation
India’s healthcare facilities are not standardised and vary from region to region. Even today, certain legacy healthcare facilities in India rely on paper-based records and manual processes. We must ensure that automated tools are not limited to just a few healthcare organisations, but spread to all healthcare providers in order to create a digital-first economy. It is important that the government and key stakeholders not only collaborate on strategic planning, but also provide critical support through investment in intelligent automation platforms, healthcare provider training, incentives, and regulatory pressure. Infrastructure and IT legacy apps may also need to be modernised to protect patient data from cybersecurity breaches, and AI will be part of this effort. By 2035, AI expenditure alone is expected to contribute USD 1 trillion to the Indian economy, and all types of organisations will be impacted by the technology. AI-powered intelligent automation will be a core capability of healthcare systems in the 21st century, providing substantial and sustainable benefits that will spread beyond practitioners and patients to the wider economy.
Dr Yan Chow, Global Healthcare Leader, Automation Anywhere(DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the author and ETHealthworld.com does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETHealthworld.com shall not be responsible for any damage caused to any person/organisation directly or indirectly).
