Four Ways Process Intelligence Is Transforming Healthcare

Healthcare is unique from many other businesses because of the ad-hoc nature of the business. Very rarely is there a straightforward process, and oftentimes, process data is spread across numerous platforms that rarely interact together. However, just like any other business, healthcare providers require a deeper understanding of their business processes, the people within them, and the data that moves through them. Unfortunately, not many existing BI or traditional process management tools can do the job – they require a new approach to process understanding and improvement; they require a comprehensive solution powered by artificial intelligence.

Meet Process Intelligence

There's a future beyond business intelligence and process mining. Organizations big and small have invested in systems and methods to collect and record all the data they can – for improvement, of course! In healthcare, especially, there are massive collections of data—everything from patient entry, lab results, and other steps and tasks that are performed before the patient leaves are recorded and logged in IT systems. Many of these events, when they are recorded, have a timestamp. ABBYY’s Process Intelligence solution takes this data and builds an interactive digital process twin, which is a unique visualization and means of analyzing process-specific data. The solution provides numerous visual models and analysis tools that help healthcare leaders to instantly identify deviations from the ideal process flow and includes easy-to-use, point-and-click tools out of the box to find the root cause of problems that could be costing your healthcare organization time and money. There’s no reason to rely on old methods any longer.

Business intelligence tools simply miss the mark in providing advanced predictive and prescriptive process analytics, and unlike other process mining vendors, ABBYY is uniquely the first and only software that embraces the complexities of healthcare processes. Other process mining vendors use a best fit analysis that simply does not work with the ad-hoc nature of healthcare.

ABBYY solutions enable healthcare organizations to streamline paper-based business processes by capturing information from documents, automatically classifying them, and routing documents and extracted patient data to health information management systems (HIM). By automating this process, healthcare providers can ensure the information is available for patient care or patient accounting with minimal labor.

Together with ABBYY, healthcare providers can tap into numerous benefits. Below are four compelling ways that healthcare providers are benefiting from Process Intelligence.

1. A More Efficient Patient Journey

Healthcare, although a science, is also an art. Very rarely is there a simple set of steps for how to treat a patient. Yes, some processes have become slightly standardized, but the fact remains that there are many different types of patients that get varying types of treatment. It can be difficult to keep track of the patient’s needs while balancing others.

We understand that the different processes and the very ad-hoc nature of healthcare have made it difficult to standardize processes or simply deploy automation like in other industries. However, despite this ad-hoc nature, healthcare still needs to provide the patient with the care they need efficiently and cost-effectively, and that’s where a complete Digital Intelligence solution can provide tremendous value.

Traditionally, providers have tried to use business intelligence tools to find where to improve processes. When they see their data on a BI platform, they can view things such as a step being repeated four times, but what is missing on a BI platform is the critical piece: WHY. Why was that step repeated four times? Why is there a bottleneck before this specific lab test? Etc. In healthcare, it very well could be justified, but was there something that the physician had missed? With business intelligence or process mining alone, many are left without answers and are unable to drill in further to discover this type of insight.

In order to try and understand the “why,” businesses typically employ project management teams to search for answers. With project management, the hope is to deeply evaluate different processes through observation, interviews, and other methods...but is this enough? These interviews are subjective and very rarely lead to results that are accurate or provide a real opportunity for improvements due to the subjective nature.

What healthcare providers really need is real-time monitoring for a view of the complete as-is process that allows for the ability to look deeper into processes to answer the whys and find opportunities to re-engineer processes. This is where a Process Intelligence solution can be tremendously valuable.

ABBYY can deliver a solution that provides 100% process clarity, giving access to all the process data connected in one place.

Yes, even legacy systems can be included. Having all this data paired with a solution specifically built to help improve your process aids any process re-engineering initiative. Process mining allows for processes to be analyzed in their as-is state but is typically limited to order to cash, procure to pay, and sales and support processes. So how will this help improve the patient experience? When process mining is paired with tools such as those included out of the box with Process Intelligence technologies, users can identify what processes are taking longest, what steps cost the most time and money, and even identify candidates for improvement or automation.

This process improvement or automation implementation can significantly increase the speed and effectiveness of patients’ journeys. A study in the American Journal of Managed Care found that, with process re-engineering, wait times for specialty appointments decreased from 82.7 days to just 7.9 days across an analysis of over 1 million consultation requests over six years.1 With the proper tools in place, process re-engineering doesn’t take a team of experts or the headache of trial and error. ABBYY gives you the ability to find opportunities for improvement with just the click of a button.

2. Better patient outcomes

With healthcare, even small delays can result in huge adverse outcomes. It is important that physicians have all the information needed in order to make the best, most informed decisions as quickly as they can. With Process Intelligence from ABBYY, physicians can access a comprehensive outline of the patient’s entire care experience at any time, anywhere due to cloud capabilities.

They can pull together information from all Healthcare Information Systems, including the Electronic Health Records and Patient Billing applications, so that it can all be viewed in one system. Although you may be able to find a system to compile all your systems in an easy-to-read way, ABBYY Timeline goes deeper to provide added tools to guarantee that standards are being followed in real-time.

ABBYY is one of the few platforms that allows you to set deadlines that trigger alerts, predict outcomes, and gives the ability to view historic trends. All of these tools allow for stakeholders to make better decisions faster. Can you imagine the impact of receiving an alert to your phone saying that a patient needs drugs administered within the next hour? Or being able to receive an alert that a patient will likely be admitted with a 90% confidence level because of their prior events? Knowing these outcomes faster highly improves the outcome for patients of all types.

3. A more efficient billing process

In healthcare, it is vital that all interactions and diagnoses are recorded accurately and as soon as possible. The longer the doctor or nurse waits to record this information, the more likely that there will be errors. With so many billing statements being processed daily, it’s not manually possible to go through each record to guarantee that they are accurate.

Frequently, these billing errors are noticed too far after they have been submitted through the health insurance companies. At this point, it is too late to file any changes. In a study in the American Journal of Patient Care, it was found that across approximately 90,000 consultations, a total of $500,000 of visits were not billed. This meant that all of this money was lost revenue to the healthcare facilities. Now scale this to your operation and imagine how much you are probably losing out on.

Process Intelligence works to ensure that tasks are performed efficiently, and requirements are fulfilled timely and quickly, while providing monitoring to ensure positive outcomes. With Process Intelligence from ABBYY, you can set deadlines that work with your real-time data. This means that you can monitor that paperwork is submitted on time. Additionally, you can set alerts that are triggered to different personnel if these deadlines are missed.

Once billing records are submitted, you can check accuracy by referring to process analytics all in one place. Having this in-depth analysis available at your fingertips allows you to quickly check billing statements against patient journeys. You can quickly filter based on a patient ID to see the patient’s whole journey, including any prior visits to see what was done, when, and by whom.

These practices in place allow for the quality assurance needed for the billing process.  

4. Improved patient satisfaction

Patient expectations are rising, and it’s up to healthcare providers to deliver these expectations or risk losing potential patients. Patients care about their overall experience – time and outcome are important factors in this.

The solution should be clear to you by now. With the right processes in place, patient satisfaction will also improve. When healthcare facilities can have faster patient journeys, improved patient outcomes, and a more accurate billing cycle, patients will become more satisfied with their experience.

No other solution can give you the insight you need to deliver the type of care that you are already striving for. Your BI tool can’t tell you the why and no biased/subjective manual process assessment is going to deliver what you need. Only ABBYY can provide you the insight that you demand across all your processes to achieve a higher level of patient care. 

In Summary

Healthcare’s ad-hoc nature requires a unique solution that can work with all systems and handle its unique complexity. With the ABBYY’s Process Intelligence solution that is power by artificial intelligence, healthcare providers can integrate all data and use pre-built solutions to understand unstructured data and discover, analyze, and improve critical processes.

ABBYY helps you understand how to improve patient experience and throughput, avoid compliance risks, and identify a wide variety of efficiency improvement opportunities quickly and at a fraction of the cost you pay today. Get an inside view into the inner workings of end-to-end operational processes for any operational unit. 

Click here to learn more about what ABBYY can do for you or sign up for a free trial today and see for yourself how ABBYY can help you target process improvements.