Improve Efficiency and Profitability with Hospital Workflow Software
By optimizing administrative, clinical, and patient workflows, healthcare providers can improve efficiency and deliver better patient care at a lower cost. One of the easiest ways of achieving this is by using hospital workflow software.
Hospital workflows have been developed to ensure patient safety, provide a high quality of care, and to comply with regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). While hospital workflows are effective, they are often inefficient. It has been estimated that around 40% of a clinician’s time is spent completing redundant or repetitive tasks. Each day, these inefficient workflows result in considerable wastage of resources and stop clinicians from spending time providing care to patients.
Hospital workflow software is concerned with automating tasks and freeing up the time of clinical and non-clinical staff, and allows managers to streamline workflows, achieve better resource utilization, accelerate patient throughput, and achieve better patient outcomes.
Hospital workflow software is used to make processes run smoothly in hospitals and automate workflows. The software eliminates paperwork and wasted effort and allows the staff to achieve more in less time. Hospital workflow software is used for creating schedules, providing easy access to medical records, eliminating time consuming paperwork, automating admissions, accelerating approvals, and improving communication and collaboration.
Benefits of Hospital Workflow Software
- Improve efficiency and cut costs
- Increase productivity of the workforce
- Reduce the administration burden on staff
- Improve communication and collaboration
- Accelerate admissions and discharges
- Speed up clinical decision making
- Deliver higher quality care
- Achieve better bed utilization
- Reduce patient wait times
- Get approvals faster
- Reduce the potential for medical errors and improve patient safety
- Eliminate paperwork
- Speed up medical record access
- Improve accuracy of recording patient data
- Improve security
- Simplify compliance
Updating Communication Systems Saves Hospitals Millions
Many healthcare providers purchase hospital workflow software to help them fine-tune workflows but fail to address one of the biggest productivity drains in hospitals: Outdated communication systems. 1 in 4 hospitals still uses pagers, even though this method of communication is far from efficient. When a doctor needs to be contacted, a page is sent, the doctor then needs to call back to find out why they are being paged. Oftentimes, that starts a game of phone tag, where each party keeps missing the other. 90% of hospitals still use fax machines for sending information, and email is still extensively used. One study suggested a typical hospital doctor wastes around 45 minutes each day as a result in inefficient communication systems. The outmoded communication systems used in hospitals is a continued cause of frustration for staff and is responsible for considerable waste. A typical 500-bed hospital loses around $4 million each year due to the continued use of these outdated communication systems.
The solution is to switch to a Clinical Communication and Collaboration (CC&C) platform. These solutions are text message based, but also support voice and video calls. They can be used for internal communication between clinicians, for consultations with specialists in other facilities, and for communicating with patients and their families and conducting telehealth visits. The platforms are HIPAA compliant so they can be used for sending and receiving patient data and they integrate with other systems such as the EHR. CC&C solutions are installed on mobile devices, so messages can be sent to the right people, at the right time, no matter where they are located. Since the solutions also integrate with the scheduling system, messages are always directed to the right on-call staff.
Hospitals that have implemented these systems have reported major improvements to clinical workflows. The platforms have improved communication which has helped improve efficiency, which has helped achieve better resource utilization, reduced patient transfer times, accelerated admissions and discharges, and faster decision making by clinicians. Many healthcare providers have reported improvements to patient safety, a reduction in readmissions, and better patient outcomes after adopting a CC&C solution.