Boosting Healthcare Service Capacity with Simple Tweaks

The healthcare industry is facing its biggest challenge yet these past few months. Hospitals and medical practices were maxed out on more than one occasion. When this happens, healthcare service quality declines almost immediately.

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For service providers, maintaining service quality is essential. That is why they turn to clever solutions and new ways of streamlining healthcare services. The crisis is far from over, but healthcare service providers are boosting their capacity with simple yet clever tweaks.

Automation

Many tasks in a common healthcare service workflow or process are actually routine and repetitive, which is why automation is the perfect technology to implement for boosting output without provisioning more resources. Automation is the way forward for modern healthcare service providers.

There are a lot of tasks that can be automated too. Filing patient records, for example, is no longer done manually. Thanks to the implementation of electronic health records (EHRs), service providers can now use a centralized database and benefit from a better distribution of information.

When changes to patients’ records are made from medical tablets and other devices, those changes are automatically merged with the existing EHRs. This eliminates the need for further manual entries and reviews. At the same time, the whole service workflow becomes more reliable.

Medical Scribe

One of the biggest bottlenecks affecting the healthcare industry is personnel. While there are a lot of new doctors and nurses joining the healthcare workforce every year, there aren’t nearly enough to meet demand spikes at a difficult time like this.

This is where medical scribes come in handy. More professionals are training to be a medical scribe in order to enter the ever-growing healthcare industry. Organizations like the Emergency Physicians Professional Association (EPPA) are making their medical scribe programs more accessible.

Demand for medical scribes is also on the rise, which means those training to be a medical scribe today will have plenty of opportunities to seize. The high market demand is being met by a growing supply of medical scribes ready to help doctors and physicians operate more efficiently.

Artificial Intelligence

We are not in an era where artificial intelligence (AI) can perform advanced healthcare tasks just yet, but that doesn’t mean AI is not useful for boosting healthcare service capacity. In fact, many service providers rely heavily on AI to make sure that they deliver good healthcare services in a timely manner.

A chat bot, for instance, can ask preliminary questions and help patients receive an early diagnosis based on the symptoms they have. AI bots can also take patients’ information, prepare schedules and appointments, and handle other administrative tasks.

Computer vision, on the other hand, is helping doctors and physicians analyze medical images faster. Instead of doing everything manually, doctors now receive pre-analyzed medical images and can perform their job with higher accuracy.

Other technologies are just as useful, but the three we covered in this article are how the healthcare industry withstands the immense pressure it now faces. The service capacity of our healthcare industry can be multiplied without putting too much stress on individual players and the industry as a whole.