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You don’t have to be a doctor, economist, or academic to recognize that health care is fundamentally flawed in the United States Waiting in a clinic for a 20-minute chat with a late doctor (not knowing how much the visit) has become customary.
It’s also common to leave a hospital feeling exhausted and stressed, due to an inflated healthcare bill (yet patients are often rushed out the door), with unclear exit instructions. – all of which compromise recovery and increase the likelihood of readmission.
Is it still possible to have a good healthcare experience today? Maybe. If one lives in the right place (and knows which hospitals to avoid), has the right insurance (and pays more for concierge access), and can manage their care (in all their free time). Understanding if the right medications are being received, how to manage follow-ups, and track recovery is an important (but likely necessary) undertaking.
While a long, probably depressing article could be written about how society got to this point (e.g., employer-backed insurance, political calculus, a focus on the pill to solve what ails us, etc.), many of our health problems have been solved, or at least are solved in other industries. Yet the healthcare community needs to enable innovation, be more open to change, and break the proverbial eggs.
Automation is probably the fastest way to evolve healthcare. Software is licensed to fly planes carrying lots of passengers, self-driving cars are gaining popularity, and you no longer have to stand in the middle of a street to hail a cab. All this automation allows us to focus on more important things. In healthcare, automation would allow providers to work at the peak of their licenses, focusing on real care versus cumbersome manual entry tasks.
Let’s start basic: automate vital functions
Suppose a person looks back in time over the past 100 years. In this case, smart, well-educated medical professionals were paid to wander from room to room every two hours, collecting four sets of patients’ vital signs a day (often waking up the recovering patient in the process). Without a doubt, this time could be better spent.
By streamlining operations and automating existing workflows, not only is there is a reduced need for manual input, but more accurate data will be acquired. As predictive analytics continues to advance, there could be a future in which care delivery is prioritized and providers don’t spend time identifying risk. Have real-time visibility and access to a patient’s entire record at the click of a button – with clinical information derived in advance, as opposed to pseudo-medico-legal alerts that have to be clicked on today today – means healthcare teams will know when and how to intervene.
Reaching more patients more efficiently and effectively isn’t the only benefit of automation – it will make the practice of medicine healthier. According to Medscape’s Physician Burnout and Depression Reportphysician burnout is worsening, with 53% of physicians reporting they are burnt out (a slight increase from 42% pre-COVID level) and 23% of physicians reporting battling depression.
Unfortunately, similar data on burnout exists for nurses and other health care providers. Automation can make a real difference: advanced technology can better inform decision-making when people provide care (making the right decision easier and simpler) and can optimize provider workflows (replacing actions routine and low value by high level care). ). Providers were trained to save lives, not to fill out often redundant forms and search endlessly and unsuccessfully through the sea of EMR data.
How to get there faster?
To be successful, providers must work alongside industry stakeholders to drive adoption of health technologies across the continuum of care and foster an open and innovative network of collaborative care.
Keeping abreast of the needs of clinicians and medical personnel today.
Factors that can speed up this process are government incentives, preventing blocking of information, and focusing less on reimbursement and more on quality. It requires understanding how patients move through the healthcare system today and how they are expected to navigate it tomorrow as automation and AI accelerate.
The right attitude, the wrong tools
In the end, it’s not about whether healthcare can catch up with other industries. It can. However, change must be accelerated through shared investments and targeted innovations. It is a mistake not to capitalize on the health technology already available and to develop faster and faster.
These innovations are not revolutionary. Jthey won’t cure cancer, speed up vaccine discovery, or produce lasting weight loss, but they could free up time for clinicians can do these things instead of scheduling patients, completing paperwork, capturing and documenting vital signs, billing – all the paperwork that fills a provider’s day in addition to patient care.
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About the Author Ben Zaniello, MD, MPH, is the Chief Medical Officer of PointClickCare, and physician specializing in infectious diseases. Zaniello is a technologist at heart, focused on health care innovation for population health and the transition to value-based care for all patients. Ben worked at Providence St. Joseph Health as Director of Population Health Medical Information. Prior to that, Zaniello did NIH-funded translational research in population health at the University of Washington while consulting in health technology. |
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