Intelligent automation is a healthcare CIO’s secret weapon. Here's why.

As we approach the second half of 2021, all eyes are on the CIO as they evaluate their current digital infrastructure and future IT investments in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In just one year, hospitals and health systems completely transformed the way they deliver care, thanks in large part to digital technologies that were leveraged to power urgent needs like telehealth and remote monitoring. Almost overnight care teams had to transition from in-clinic to virtual visits, implement processes for touchless check-in and registration, and pivot at a moment’s notice to triage COVID-19 cases, testing and vaccinations.

Long before the pandemic, healthcare has been saddled by a heavy administrative burden that has stifled productivity and increased operating costs. Additionally, behemoth technology implementations that historically take months or years to deploy, prevent health systems from being able to adapt their workflows, systems and processes quickly in support of the most critical objectives.

With so many variables to consider, how can CIOs set up their infrastructure to support immediate temporary goals, while driving longer term outcomes or ongoing initiatives? Because of its massive scalability and configurability, intelligent automation — the combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA) — is being adopted by health systems of all sizes to drive short-term and long-term digital transformation in service of key strategic objectives across the care continuum.

The power of intelligent automation to improve outcomes

Workflow optimization is a key initiative that can be solved with intelligent automation. The 700+ hours of time clinicians save per year by automating repetitive, manual tasks through Notable, means they can spend more time on patient care and less time on paperwork. In contrast to a point solution that targets a specific problem, the Notable platform offers an integrated compound solution for automating and digitizing manual workflows from the front desk to the back office.

By combining leading-edge AI components such as computer vision, natural language processing (NLP), and ML classifiers with resilient RPA, Notable’s platform allows for rapid white-labeled automations configured for any workflow, such as care gap closure.

The video below shows how a Notable bot uses optical character recognition (OCR) and NLP to identify and close a care gap — in this case, for a patient who is due for a mammogram:

• Bots remotely log in to the EHR and scan the patient’s record for procedure reports and scanned documents; the bots identify all documents that pertain to a mammogram and sees the patient is due for a breast cancer screening.
• Using OCR, the bots transcribe the PDF image(s) to text, and parse out the meaningful data (i.e.: name and date of the procedure, provider, and result).
• Bots find that the most recent mammogram is from 2019 and immediately notify the provider by automatically populating a note the EMR that the patient is due for a new one.

Once a care gap has been identified, Notable automatically reaches out to the patient to let them know they are due for a visit and schedule the appointment. Using advanced machine learning capabilities like deep-learning based object classification, OCR, and NLP, Notable can improve care gap closure by up to 33 percentage points. In addition to improving care for patients, automating care gap closure also reduces the amount of outbound calls and data entry required from staff in order to get new or existing patients in the door. In fact, Notable has been shown to create ~120 new visits per provider per year, and saves staff over 3 hours per day to focus on higher-fidelity tasks.

Since the inception of Notable, one of our core principles is to provide full configurability of our platform. Notable’s automations can be rapidly configured and modified in a matter of weeks via a no-code interface, allowing administrators to enable capabilities and tailor them as the needs of their organization or patient population evolve. For example, healthcare staff can choose the language, timing and frequency of patient communications to ensure that it best serves their patient population. By focusing all our efforts on healthcare, Notable’s AI and RPA are specifically tailored to HIT problems out-of-the-box, and are constantly improving as new skills and capabilities are added.

The time is now to fine tune the HIT stack with intelligent automation

Offloading manual tasks like chart scrubbing and care gap outreach means clinicians have increased capacity to see more patients without having to hire more staff to support them. Care gap closure is just one example of 100s of flows that can be automated across population health, patient access and revenue cycle management domains.

With Notable, CIOs can improve the flow of data and communication, reduce administrative waste and eliminate IT complexities that threaten the future of healthcare. With intelligent automation, we can unlock the promise of healthcare technology to improve the quality and efficiency of care at the lowest operational cost.

To learn more about how IT and digital innovation teams can use RPA and AI to transform healthcare operations, check out this whitepaper on automation workflows.