Business Process Automation in Health 

… A Matter of Life or Death!

The private hospital sector is under increasing pressure from regulators to improve safety standards for patients and hospital staff. With the media full of stories relating to the CQC (Care Quality Commission) stating 2 out of 3 private hospitals are failing to meet safety standards, it is clear that improvements are required to ensure patients and staff are protected.While this issue is a complex one and has many contributing factors, this article will focus on how business process automation in health and AI can help increase safety while also ensuring hospitals have the power to show improvements to regulators and also the NHS.

The CQC’s findings and recommendations were focused on the following areas for improvement:

• Patient records
• Clinical hygiene standards and routines
• Medicinal records and tracking

 

These recommendations have common themes and all pertain to people, process and data. A good example of this is record keeping and the need to automate processes for tracking, scheduling and managing patients and staff within a hospital.

The CQC reported in some cases examples of patients who had undergone incorrect operations! What this means is that patients can receive life changing injuries through the hospital simply not having a robust and holistic mechanism for tracking patient records. In extreme cases this can and has resulted in death!

The risks are equally profound within clinical hygiene compliance. Regulators found that a lack of accountability for healthcare professionals to uphold proper standards of hygiene is resulting in patient mortality.  As an example, during visits to Fawkham Manor, CQC inspectors found the wrong patient being taken to theatre and staff going into operations without cleaning their hands or making thorough pre-operative checks. With no way of having a reliable audit trail of training and associated checks, this meant that health care professionals were becoming complacent – ultimately exposing patients to unnecessary risks of severe infections.

This theme continues with the accurate tracking (or lack thereof) of the medication patients should be receiving. A simple paperwork error by an administrator or doctor could mean patients are prescribed medication that could prove inadequate to combat their illness, or worse.

The above issues are powered by the fact hospitals are running the processes from old legacy (inadequate) systems or very human centric, manually based processes.  This is unfortunately a challenge shared by many healthcare providers. The siloed data within them is causing the following problems:

• Duplicated customer / patient records
• Time spent manually updating systems
• Inaccuracies from manual data entries
• Inability to reliably report and analyse performance

 

psKINETIC have been working with Private Healthcare organisations for over a decade to automate and streamline mission critical processes, reduce risk, create efficiency and have a standardised process approach whereby we enforce accountability.  While it is true that current e-Prescribing and Health Information Management solutions will help increase safety for patients, these solutions do not address many of the above problems which continue to cause risk to the public. Even replacing disparate EOL systems with new versions – a strategy which also includes huge upfront time, resource and investment in a market which is continually having to do more with less – is not a viable option anymore because this does not allow for rapid change in a highly regulated and forever changing market.  psKINETIC provide a 360-degree view of a patient, the associated medical data and pathway which enables complete visibility and eradicates mistakes surrounding patient care.

Intelligent digital process automation enables hospitals to use the rich data that exists in their legacy systems to create future proof, agile, and secure applications that can be designed to meet specific processes in today’s challenging environment. By automating processes, the risk of errors from manual data input is addressed. This also substantially reduces the time spent on repetitive admin tasks. It has been shown by implementing digital process automation, organisations can reduce administration time and effort by up to 98%!

The value of digital process automation is significant, psKINETIC has been a strategic delivery partner in the health sector for over a decade and are trusted advisors to many organisations including BMI, BUPA and Maximus. We are hugely experienced and have an in-depth understanding of the challenges being faced today.

psKINETIC would like the opportunity to provide visibility of that experience and the business process automation in health solutions we have deployed – why not contact Liam Woods at liam.woods@pskinetic.com or 07747 032888?