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Automating Patient Intake, a Great Start to Care Orchestration

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Automating Patient Intake, a Great Start to Care Orchestration

April 28, 2022

Incorporating automation into your care processes can improve care coordination and take care delivery from good to great. But taking healthcare from great to exceptional requires evolution beyond simple automation – care orchestration. Care orchestration integrates data from multiple sources, applies clinical knowledge in real-time, and uses intelligent automation to individualize each patient’s care at […]

Redefining Patient Intake for the Digital Era: 3 Reasons to Care

April 11, 2022

Patient intake. While seemingly simple, the process involved in patient intake is complicated, involving multiple steps across multiple teams within healthcare organizations: registration, billing and insurance, medical history, privacy, and consent; that all have to be completed before an appointment can be scheduled. Unfortunately, intake feels like lots of duplication to the patient, with multiple […]

What is Patient Intake?

April 2, 2022

Patient intake is how healthcare organizations ensure they have everything they need from the patient before an appointment. This includes multiple steps across different teams – gathering or verifying important information for registration, billing and insurance, medical history, privacy, and consent, ensuring all are accounted for and up to date. Unfortunately, intake is often complex […]

How Can We Bring Back the Joy of Nursing in 2022?

January 12, 2022

In the face of overwhelmed hospitals and high burnout and illness rates among staff, leveraging systems that automate the guidance of patient care journeys can make a significant difference to hospital care teams.

How to Use the CMS H&P Exception to Improve Surgical Pre-Assessment Caseload by +60%

December 22, 2021

The elimination of non-indicated tests in low-risk patients promotes patient safety, improves quality of care, and results in substantial cost savings – here is more support for that view.

How to Boost Surgical Productivity in 2022

December 16, 2021

With 88% of research respondents saying they need to boost surgical profitability over the next 12-18 months, perioperative care is in the crosshairs for digitization. Leaders agree that using automation tools to streamline preoperative readiness would profoundly relieve frazzled care teams, helping them ramp surgeries back up without undue strain.   

Addressing the Capacity Crunch in Perioperative Care

December 10, 2021

Instead of asking our teams to do the same or more with less, it is time to think about doing things differently. It is time to think about how we can make this easier for the team while providing equal or better care. There is much we can do now to improve the situation by streamlining care with the use of automation technology. Well-placed, comprehensive, digital tools can free up capacity, reduce staff burnout, and improve productivity.  

Is Staffing in Perioperative Care at a Crisis Point?

November 24, 2021

One of the primary ways healthcare leaders are looking to reduce burden is by virtualizing perioperative care. Our survey found that leaders see the two most important goals of virtualizing care to be freeing up staff capacity and reducing staff burnout. 

HealthCare Leaders Herald New Productivity Era for Perioperative Care

November 17, 2021

Insights from a survey of 85 surgery leaders commissioned by Lumeon in October 2021 shed light on current challenges, priorities, and opportunities for perioperative care. The majority of those interviewed say they are suffering major staff capacity issues and seek alternative ways to drive productivity and efficiency. 

If There Aren’t Enough Nurses, What Do You Do?

November 4, 2021

The journey to digitally transform a patient experience can feel overwhelming - it’s a huge endeavor for those who are thinking about it strategically - and this is when chunking down can be applied to make things easier.  

Incorporating automation into your care processes can improve care coordination and take care delivery from good to great. But taking healthcare from great to exceptional requires evolution beyond simple automation – care orchestration.

Care orchestration integrates data from multiple sources, applies clinical knowledge in real-time, and uses intelligent automation to individualize each patient’s care at scale.

The good news is you can break down this evolution into manageable steps. When thinking of automating processes, you can begin anywhere, but consider looking at your patient access and intake processes to drive value right from the start. 

Automation Your Way

With automation, you can think more holistically upfront and implement strategically in manageable phases. Starting small means faster deployment and value realization. Change can be managed more tightly and proof seen by stakeholders to drive project momentum and provide a clear picture of what orchestration can do.

Another automation approach is to dive in with the end-to-end workflow – tackling the access, intake, and post-visit communication to complete a single user experience throughout. Access can include automated appointment reminders and notifications, rescheduling, and cancellations. Post-visit communications can include simple outreach to check-in with the patient, surveys for feedback, and automated follow-up activities. A more holistic implementation centered around the patient’s care journey creates more value for the patient and the teams managing and coordinating care activities.

Tips for Automating Patient Intake

So how do you know how much to bite off? What’s the best way to think about this?

1. Start with the key metrics and challenges for your area. Are you trying to reduce no-shows, increase capacity for your teams by reducing manual tasks, or help your teams focus on key activities instead of low-level tasks?  Do you have staffing challenges? Where are the bottlenecks in the processes? Are there patient populations you have a hard time managing or reaching?
2. Define what good, great, and exceptional care operations processes look like in your department and for your population of patients. Consider automating best practice workflows with different populations – primary care, chronic conditions, and day surgery.
3. Do a gap analysis. Create one end-to-end care journey map for today – from the first patient interaction to the conclusion of their appointment and follow-up. Then look at what you’d like it to be in the future with automation. Be sure to include every step of the process, consider all user groups impacted, and involve all parties upfront.
4. Treat ‘go-live’ as just the beginning. Once live, it is typical to adjust and optimize the pathway. But at this point, the work of orchestration – extending your starter pathway to encompass care more longitudinally or to alternative/parallel pathways based on diagnosis, response, or preference – is only just beginning.

Check out our new infographic, Pitfalls of Patient Intake and how to address them

Evolving Automation to Care Orchestration

There is no right or wrong way to tackle process automation; it’s hard to know where to begin, how much to bite off, and how to tie together an orchestrated environment. But one thing’s for sure – it helps to learn from the experience of others and build on what’s worked well rather than what hasn’t; patient intake is a good place to start.

Ready to get started? We’ve helped organizations like yours dive into automation with success. We’d love to show you the results and share how we can drive impactful automation for you, too.

Contact us to learn more.