Clinical Workflow Automation
Processing patients through busy clinics is challenging. With changes taking place daily, it is difficult for traditional hospital systems to manage the flow of people, medications, devices, lab tests and referrals that comprise today’s managed care process.
Most clinics rely on a combination of traditional hospital information systems, paper forms and electronic spreadsheets to attempt to keep up with patient flow. However, this old-fashioned approach is often unwieldy, time-consuming and error prone.
The first step in solving this problem is to bring all pertinent patient data under a single common view so that clinicians can assess their cases quickly and completely at a glance. Additionally, automatic data transfers from various departments to a common database provide valuable time and data quality benefits for clinicians who, in the past, had to contact each department personally for their results.
Once the data is unified and structured, the workflow aspect comes into play as teams follow the prescribed protocol for each patient based on a series of schedules and events. For example, when lab results are loaded into a database each morning, a practitioner can be notified by email to begin contacting patients with their test results.
Properly tuned workflows result in higher compliance to established protocols. Resulting high-quality workflow data can be converted into key performance indicators (KPIs) which can then be tracked and the results fed back into the workflow via a closed loop to measure and improve the process.