Best Practices, Automation, and Acceleration: 3 Key Takeaways from Noteworthy 2024

Notable hosted its annual Noteworthy executive retreat this week. Sessions focused on best practices in transforming work with artificial intelligence, accelerating quality performance, and enabling patient access.

Healthcare executives, industry changemakers, and Notable leaders gathered for engaging discussions, hands-on product demos, and thoughtful keynotes, all focused on the opportunity for AI-powered automation to improve quality outcomes, reduce administrative burden, advance value-based care initiatives, and empower staff to prioritize top-of-license work. ‍

1. Administrative Burden in Healthcare is Still Unsustainable

Patients navigating complex health conditions often face overwhelming administrative hurdles, such as referrals, prior authorizations, and follow-up care. These burdens not only delay treatment but also contribute to poor care outcomes and inefficiencies. 

During his opening keynote, Dr. Aaron Neinstein, Chief Medical Officer at Notable, shared the story of Laura Stratte, a cancer care navigator and breast cancer survivor, who documented her experience tracking the amount of time she spent managing her cancer treatment on the Out of Pocket website. Laura shared that she spent about 20-30 hours per month on healthcare touchpoints to manage her care, which required her to visit a healthcare facility for an average of 2-3 days per week, every week, during the 5.5 months she tracked.

She writes: “And yet somehow going through chemotherapy and dealing with cancer was less painful than dealing with the billing department. I’m both literally and figuratively ripping my hair out.”

Administrative burden isn’t just a threat to patient access and care but also a key contributor to burnout among healthcare staff. Historically, the main tool for achieving new outcomes has been to hire additional staff. Automation offers a new path to productivity and improved outcomes. 

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2. We Can't Hire Our Way to Productivity

Health systems face many challenges when it comes to hiring; there are more than two million open administrative healthcare roles across the US. And worse, even if organizations could fill those open administrative roles, high attrition rates – 28 percent – and high costs associated with recruiting and training staff mean that simply hiring more people won’t resolve the underlying issues. Health systems cannot afford to maintain or increase staffing levels at the current rate, especially as workforce shortages worsen. The solution isn't just more hiring—it's radically rethinking how work gets done.

During his closing keynote, Erik Brynjolfsson, a prominent figure in the field of AI and economics and an expert in AI’s role in transforming productivity, discussed this tough reality and the imperative for healthcare organizations to measure and identify the specific tasks that are best for AI and those that are best for humans.

He shared that to hasten productivity, we must reimagine work, be willing to radically change, cannibalize existing processes, and reconsider old assumptions about how things must be done. 

Indeed, U.S. health systems are finding themselves at an inflection point where greater operational efficiency, better patient access and clinical outcomes, and higher staff satisfaction are highly dependent on organizations addressing head-on the challenges of administrative burden and realizing that there is a better way forward.

3. Automation Can Transform Healthcare Productivity

During the event, presentations focused on the core challenges of helping care delivery scale access and quality to more patients without adding staff and touched on a pain point for many providers: manual chart reviews, preparations, and coordination. 

Dr. Neinstein shared, “I’ll tell you... You do not want to talk to me on the night before I have my clinic. I love seeing my patients, but doing hours of manual chart reviews and chart prep is not my idea of fun.”

And he’s not alone. 

Throughout the event, digital transformation leaders and operations executives shared how their care teams were buried by piles of prior authorizations, faxes, work queues, and other administrative tasks, preventing the delivery of high-quality care and support for those who need it most.

AI-powered workflow automation presents the next great opportunity for healthcare's digital evolution. Tackling a wide array of tasks, such as scheduling, financial management, pre-visit prep, care coordination, and data entry, is the first step in freeing up human workers for more meaningful, high-impact tasks and improving both operational metrics and patient care outcomes.