[Partner content] The staffing shortage raised several eyebrows in post-acute care, with leaders looking for new ways to make their existing staff more efficient. Automation technology has made it possible for teams to spend less time on daily administrative work, and focus on higher-value tasks.
When McKinsey revealed that a third of all healthcare processes had the potential to be automated, healthcare providers had a clear and strategic roadmap on how automation would factor into their digitization plans for the future. Over the last five years, health systems and payers have found a wide range of use cases that allow them to explore the possibility of automation, and have begun implementing an automation roadmap. However, post-acute care organizations have only recently discovered the impact automation has on their everyday work. For an industry plagued by the staffing shortage, the timing could not be more perfect. Automation is helping home health care, home care, hospice and skilled nursing facilities spend less time on work that involves multiple repetitive clicks between their existing systems.
What makes post-acute care ripe for automation
The staffing shortage has forced several hospices to close down, and reports suggest that 58% of the nation’s 14,000 nursing homes are limiting admissions because they are understaffed. While finding skilled staff continues to be a challenge, administrative functions at post-acute care agencies are seeing their fair share of problems. Constantly evolving regulations and compliances force agencies to spend hours on repetitive paperwork. Operations teams are forced to move information from one system (an EHR for instance) to another system (a financial or payor portal). Most often, teams have to manually perform these tasks, typing out every field and entering every column in the record. These processes are repetitive, involve a thousand clicks and can take hours; time that can be better spent on higher value tasks.
Automation and what it really is
Workflow automation is made possible with a combination of technologies that include Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA). While the world is familiar with AI, RPA is the process of using software robots that perform a group of set instructions to complete a task. The bots are instructed to log into systems on behalf of teams, and complete tasks just like a human user would. Simply put, automation is an always-on digital workforce that gets the job done, doesn’t need coffee breaks and is highly accurate. Two of the most salient features of automation in post-acute care are timeliness and consistency. The robots perform their tasks exactly at the time they are instructed to and are unencumbered by pitfalls of human nature. Additionally, each time they perform a certain task, the quality and consistency of their output remains just as high as the first time, eliminating the possibility of errors caused by repetitive fatigue.
What you can automate in post-acute care
Across the patient journey and care continuum, there are limitless opportunities for automation. Home care, home health, hospice and other post-acute care organizations are automating processes such as intake, referrals, authorization, and eligibility verification. Home health agencies participating in the Review Choice Demonstration have successfully been able to automate the pre-claim review process. Hospices choose to automate the NoE and NOTRs, ensuring the five-day window is met seamlessly. Compliance-based tasks such as audit checklists and OASIS submission to iQIES are tasks that can be easily automated to free staff time. Automation also delivers huge upside potential across Revenue Cycle Management with tasks such as Claims Processing and Claims Denial Management being performed with minimal human supervision or intervention. The figure below illustrates a small window into some of the easiest opportunities post-acute care organizations can explore while kicking off their automation journey.
What it takes to get started
With a wide range of RPA platforms available in the market today, post-acute care organizations are spoiled for choice when it comes to choosing their bot providers. Fast movers have already chosen to purchase bots and build their own automated workflows. However, the challenge lies in being able to sustain a long term strategy. While there are thousands of success stories in automation, what no one tells you about your automation journey is how difficult it can be to get your very first workflow automated. Apart from the costs of bots, there are significant costs associated with designing, building and testing infrastructure, not to mention the maintenance and upkeep. The need for technical resources and skilled RPA engineers, also makes this a challenge as organizations are looking to scale.
However, there are easier options that post-acute care agencies can turn to. Companies like Element5 offer a wide range of pre-built workflows so organizations don’t have to perform any of the development and heavy lifting. The service is billed based on usage and delivered as a SaaS model, with all maintenance and upkeep included.
Automation is the need of the hour
As the staffing shortage continues to rise, post-acute care organizations need to find newer ways to overcome their challenges. With an unwavering focus on patient care, teams will turn to solutions like automation to take over their repetitive administrative work. The strength of automation lies in its ability to remain non-intrusive and operate on top of existing systems. This way, post-acute care teams have a digital teammate to rely on, who gets the job done.
