Clinical Workflow Automation

Clinical workflow automation enables healthcare teams to improve outcomes, enhance efficiencies, reduce costs and improve revenue capture.

A critical component of patient care, workflow automation ensures staff have the information they need to perform their duties. For example, if clinicians need to plan for medications, critical insights about the potential risk of an allergic reaction or other side effects should be served right within the order form.

In addition, workflow automation can facilitate patient coordination with family members. Automated text messaging provides timely updates on a patient's status and care progress to their loved ones, keeping them informed throughout their stay.

Expediting operational processes with workflow automation, enabling purposeful communication among care teams and accelerating complex case delivery, improves patient safety and outcomes while optimizing resources and staffing.

Key areas of focus to consider when designing and implementing workflow automation include attending to data systems and how they interoperate and are integrated, technical infrastructure and its ability to support desired automation activities or processes, the ability to effectively present knowledge and information visually, design and needs of decision rules, and security requirements.

In the current state of health care in the United States, there is a great opportunity to advance workflow automation to further improve the patient experience of care and reduce errors. However, this requires careful consideration of which workflows to automate, what instrumentation may be required to implement automation solutions, how to measure effectiveness and who benefits from these technologies.