By Hernan Giraldo
In today’s dynamic and rapidly shifting healthcare landscape, there is a constant technological change that’s paving the way for smoother and streamlined processes. The adaption to smart technology and the added use of AI is evident across all sectors of the industry. The outcome of this paradigm shift has been advantageous for both employees as well as employers. While many people are uncertain of the AI-enabled processes, countless results have shown a boost in employee satisfaction levels across organizations as employees now have a balanced allocation of their skills and time.
The added use of AI interventions in operations demonstrates a deeply innovative potential in terms of how healthcare is offered, managed, and trusted. Today, every aspect of the healthcare industry has the potential to engage with AI, starting from scheduling appointments and two-way automated communication to the techniques for testing, evaluating, and treating patients.
When using AI for business purposes there is no one-size-fits-all approach that one can stick to. Healthcare businesses need to identify their goals and ongoing challenges for IT experts to be able to design a perfectly suitable AI program for reducing the burden of administrative tasks.
As the US healthcare purposefully shifts from the ‘Fee for Service’ model to ‘Value Based Care’, patients move to pay for the value of care provided to them as opposed to the services in isolation. To make this shift more meaningful and outcomes-driven, it is important to monitor clinical outcomes more closely, deliver care more proactively, measuring and improving clinical outcomes. All of these can be tied to the appropriate integration and implementation of AI throughout the patient care continuum.
One of the major areas where AI has made significant strides is in streamlining administrative tasks. If manually done, these tasks aren’t just time-consuming but are also prone to a lot of errors, therefore needing more focus to avoid these errors. AI has helped administrators with the capability to dissect and sort out large quantities of patient data and medical history. By automating repetitive and time-consuming processes, AI can free up valuable resources and allow healthcare professionals to concentrate more on direct patient care.
Scheduling appointments is a common task that can be efficiently handled by AI. AI-powered scheduling systems produce effective and balanced schedules by leveraging historical data, patient preferences, and resource availability. These systems respond in real-time to cancellations and rescheduling, ensuring maximum resource utilization and decreasing patient wait times. This not only saves time for both patients and staff but also reduces the errors committed in scheduling.
Resource allocation is another thing that AI is helping with. AI can dissect and predict the patient inflow, therefore enabling the administrators to allow the optimum allocation of resources. By studying and analyzing previous data, seasonal trends, and external factors organizations can employ and emplace staff, call for further resources, and so on.
AI also automates the claims processing by checking the claim accuracy, tallying for compliance, and identifying the potential discrepancies that may occur, this helps in faster payments and avoids any risks that may occur in future audits.
Through the use of AI-driven NLP (Natural Language Processing) spoken or written language can be organized into structured data. This makes way for streamlined clinical documentation, coding, and billing thus reducing the administrative burden as well as the risk of errors.
AI is steering a new period of effectiveness and efficiency in the healthcare administration and this significant shift in the healthcare domain isn’t just helping the administrators but is also seen as a way of enhancing patient experiences and outcomes, as administrators can now increase their focus on patient-centric activities thus fostering a culture of better, safer and more efficient care.
The author is Chief Digital Officer, IKS Health
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