All Articles

4 ways automation is helping healthcare

Oct 23, 2024

Here are four innovative ways automation is driving efficiency, enhancing the patient experience, and supporting providers in delivering better care.

Here are four innovative ways automation is driving efficiency, enhancing the patient experience, and supporting providers in delivering better care.

Here are four innovative ways automation is driving efficiency, enhancing the patient experience, and supporting providers in delivering better care.

1. Conversational AI at call centers

For many patients, their first point of contact with healthcare is a call to a hospital or clinic’s call center. Traditionally, these centers rely on human staff to answer patient inquiries, schedule appointments, manage billing questions, and handle other requests. However, high call volumes often result in long wait times, leading to frustration for patients and inefficiency for healthcare providers. Conversational AI is changing this by automating patient interactions through natural language processing, allowing patients to communicate with AI-driven agents who can handle routine requests swiftly.

An example of Conversational AI in action is the partnership between Community Health Systems (CHS) and Denim Health, aimed at deploying Conversational AI across CHS’s Patient Access Center. By utilizing AI to handle tasks such as appointment scheduling, appointment reminders, and billing inquiries, CHS can reduce call wait times, alleviate the workload on human staff, and deliver a more seamless experience for patients. The AI can understand patient questions and guide them through tasks, enhancing accessibility to services without the need for long waits.

Impact: Conversational AI increases patient satisfaction by reducing wait times, improves operational efficiency in call centers, and ensures patients get faster access to scheduling, billing, and other services. By handling routine tasks, it frees up call center staff to focus on more complex inquiries, leading to a better experience for both patients and providers.

2. Clinical note taking AI

Documentation is a crucial part of healthcare, but it’s a time-consuming task that often takes clinicians away from patient care. Clinical note-taking AI is changing this by automating the recording, structuring, and organizing of clinical notes during patient interactions. This automation enables healthcare providers to focus more on patient engagement rather than administrative duties.

Riverside Health provides a powerful example of clinical note-taking AI in action through its partnership with Abridge. This AI listens to clinician-patient conversations, transcribes them in real-time, and generates structured notes that integrate directly into the electronic health record (EHR) system. This automation saves clinicians time, increases the accuracy of documentation, and ensures that each patient interaction is fully documented without interrupting the flow of the consultation.

Impact: Clinical note-taking AI reduces clinician workload by automating the documentation process, increases the accuracy of patient records, and frees up time for clinicians to spend with patients, ultimately enhancing the quality of care. By ensuring that all relevant details are captured and recorded efficiently, this technology also helps providers stay compliant with documentation requirements and avoid potential legal issues.

3. Credentialing AI

Credentialing healthcare professionals is an essential yet lengthy process. This process involves verifying each provider’s education, licensure, certifications, and background checks, ensuring they meet industry standards and regulations. For healthcare facilities, delays in credentialing can mean a loss of revenue, as new providers are unable to begin seeing patients until they’re fully credentialed. Credentialing AI speeds up this process by automating many of the manual steps, which can drastically cut down the time and cost involved.

Tampa General Hospital, for example, partnered with Medallion to implement credentialing automation. By using Medallion’s AI-driven credentialing platform, Tampa General was able to reduce credentialing times and save $2.4 million in return on investment. The automated system handles the repetitive tasks of credentialing and ensures accuracy in verifying qualifications, which allows the hospital to quickly onboard qualified staff, meet regulatory standards, and provide patients with timely care.

Impact: Credentialing AI reduces the time and cost of credentialing healthcare professionals, enables healthcare facilities to onboard qualified staff faster, and maintains compliance with industry standards. This automation supports revenue generation by getting providers to work sooner, minimizing the delay between hiring and active patient care.

4. Claim scrubbing AI

Claim denials are a costly and time-consuming challenge for healthcare providers. Errors in claim submissions—whether due to incorrect coding, missing information, or failure to meet payer requirements—are common reasons for denials, which result in revenue delays and a greater administrative burden. Claim scrubbing AI is designed to catch errors before claims are submitted, reducing the likelihood of denials and helping providers secure reimbursements faster.

MyWellbeing, a healthcare provider, partnered with Arrow to deploy a claim scrubbing AI solution that reduced claim denials by an impressive 85%. Arrow’s AI-driven claim scrubbing system reviews claims for potential errors and inconsistencies before submission, ensuring claims are complete and accurate according to payer requirements. This reduces the number of denied claims and minimizes the need for rework and resubmissions, improving cash flow and reducing administrative burdens on billing teams.

Impact: Claim scrubbing AI significantly reduces claim denial rates, enhances cash flow by securing timely reimbursements, decreases the need for manual intervention in resubmissions, and allows billing staff to focus on more complex cases. With fewer errors, providers can optimize their revenue cycle and free up resources for other critical tasks.

You can read more about our partnership with MyWellbeing in this case study!

Conclusion

Automation is increasingly essential in healthcare, addressing some of the industry’s most pressing challenges by making processes more efficient, accurate, and patient-centered. Conversational AI in call centers, clinical note-taking AI, credentialing AI, and claim scrubbing AI are just a few examples of how automation is creating significant improvements across the healthcare continuum. These technologies streamline workflows, reduce administrative burdens, improve cash flow, and empower healthcare professionals to focus more on patient care and less on paperwork.

As automation technologies continue to evolve, they hold even greater potential to drive efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance the quality of healthcare delivery. By embracing these tools, healthcare providers can navigate the complexities of modern healthcare while delivering a better experience for both patients and staff.

Join the future of healthcare payments.

Join the future of
healthcare payments.

Join the future of
healthcare payments.

Get Started