Adopting automation in healthcare is a responsibility to our communities

With an aging population and a shortage of future doctors and nurses in the pipeline, we are in tomorrow’s healthcare crisis today, warns Jacob Rouse, Amitech Solutions’ Automation Practice Lead, who has over 13 years’ experience working in financial and operational healthcare leadership. “The writing is on the wall,” he says.

“If we look at the 20-year forecast for caregivers, we are going to have less nurses and doctors than we do today. It will happen at the same time as our population drastically ages and the need for care increases at an exponential rate,” says Jacob. In fact, even today it’s predicted that we’re short more than 3 million medical professionals, like home health aides and assistants. And according to research by McKinsey, 31% of nurses said they might leave their direct patient care positions. But key factors, like doing meaningful work, manageable workloads, and access to technology, could influence them to stay.

“We are going to have to figure out how to transform the ways caregivers are spending their time,” says Jacob. “We can’t have caregivers using a quarter of their time documenting needlessly. We can’t have our physicians speaking through a conversation with a patient just to manually attempt to recall and document that conversation.”

In Jacob’s view, the systemic changes required to convince people to enter the healthcare workforce is a greater barrier than using technology to make people want to stay in healthcare in the first place. “There needs to be an efficiency to what we are doing,” he adds. Intelligent automation—from simple use cases that replace nursing staff manually keying data from electronic health records to quality portals, for example, to enterprise programs that can save hospital systems millions of dollars yearly—is the place to start tackling this crisis.

Solutions like robotic process automation alleviate staff burnout, improve patient outcomes, and have a compelling return on investment. Automating mundane, time-consuming tasks is a definite way to free up healthcare professionals so they can do what they were trained to do—work directly with patients. And it’s the swiftest way to combat disparity in healthcare access and outcomes. “Financial strains of health systems aren’t going anywhere,” explains Jacob. “We’ll continue to see closures of hospitals and clinics and lack of healthcare access. Certain sensitive populations will bear the brunt of these soaring costs.” Adopting these new ways of working is “a responsibility to our communities,” says Jacob.

To learn more about how intelligent automation can help your staff and patients, click here to get in touch with Jacob.