2020-2021 was the straw that nearly broke post-acute care’s back. Newer problems rearing their heads every other day and older ones getting worse, from staffing shortages, burnouts, archaic tech infrastructures to the truckloads of administrative bottlenecks across the entire post-acute care continuum. With the healthcare workforce stretched to its limits, these issues quickly turned into a huge constraint to care delivery.
The past year also shone new light on the importance and state of the home health and hospice industry across the United States. With changing care preferences, spurred on by the pandemic, the home quickly became a setting of choice for an increasing number of people. The need to ensure continued care delivery required the home health and hospice industry to look inwards to enact change by adopting new technologies to aid better patient care.
Disrupted administration, connected patient care
While a lot of the care delivery is reliant on human interaction, there is a vast, complex, and tedious administrative machinery that supports and enables the delivery of care. Automation deployment across the plethora of manual, tedious workflows across intake, revenue cycle, supply chain, compliance, and more will disrupt the home health and hospice industry. The time is right with increased investment and interest in the industry. The technology and its implementation are fiscally viable, easily achievable with the right partner, with quick, tangible ROI, and will supercharge both the operations and staff of home health and hospice agencies.
Today, home health and hospice staff across the industry are bogged down by tedious administrative tasks required by compliance for seamless operations and maintaining cash flow. Be it managing inventory, claim submissions and denial management, invoices, or updating EHRs most agencies are chronically behind on these tasks. The staff is left battling these tasks which inhibit focus on patient care and drain morale, causing revenue leaks, burnouts, and increased turnovers. Trained software robots powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) take care of these tasks and prevent them from affecting operations and cash flow. The ability of AI & RPA powered bots to perform the rule-based administrative tasks without fatigue and errors enables home health and hospice agencies to focus on improving care delivery, freeing up more time for staff to ensure better patient outcomes.
Transforming the back office of home health and hospices with automation
The massive amounts of potential savings from automating manual, tedious tasks apart, the true ROI at this juncture is from the hundreds of hours saved that could go towards care. The time and staff energies saved in trying to escape the quicksand that is administrative tasks by itself can help in the fight to tackle shortages. With the right technology partner, such as Element5, true ROI-led workflow automation can boost productivity across all levels of operations at home health agencies & hospices, reduce staff burnouts and tackle the inefficiencies towards one goal: better patient experience. Learn more about how automation powered by AI & RPA can help your home health or hospice agency here.
