The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how vulnerable organizations across industries are – including healthcare. With increasing pressure to optimize patient care and prevent the spreading of new diseases, healthcare providers are exploring new ways to improve their processes. Luckily, advances in technology have allowed automated recording of clinical and administrative data, providing insights into day-to-day operations.
Healthcare processes (clinical and administrative) are spread across people (patients and personnel), and technology (Hospital Information Systems (HIS), electronic health record (EHR), the internet of things (IoT), and other advanced software. From patients coming in, doctors performing exams, medical scans, surgery to paying bills and salaries, there are thousands of complex and multidisciplinary processes that are recorded in several systems – making an ideal case for process discovery.
Opportunities for process discovery in healthcare
Process discovery can show how healthcare processes are executed and identify challenges that are holding back optimization opportunities for providing timely, cost-effective, and quality medical services. Process discovery provides the following benefits:
- Insights into processes: since most of the healthcare processes are unstructured and have exceptions, these insights help to discover the main process flow along with the deviations.
- Checking the process conformance: monitor if processes follow the right sequential order and comply with your clinical guidelines.
- Insights into the performance rate and waiting times in processes: calculate how long it takes for a process to start after completion of the previous process. This indicates the time patients spend on waiting.
- How resources work within a process: identify which resource needs to come in at which stage of the activity and how tasks are handed over between the teams.
How to use process discovery to optimize emergency room processes
Every day, numerous cases come to emergency rooms (ER). In response to different types of episodes in the ER, several activities are undertaken in a sequential or parallel manner. A few activities performed specifically for certain patients. While executing these activities, certain clinical guidelines and protocols need to be followed. Ideally, it’s assumed that these episodes and activities would follow a standard process. However, in the real world, the general process model is spaghetti-like.
Process discovery helps to expose and understand the degree of process heterogeneity involved in patient care while identifying areas of probably unexplained heterogeneity. It automatically groups the activities and sub-processes by analyzing those that show a more regular execution. The complete visibility into “AS-IS” processes helps to verify the adherence to standard clinical guidelines of care protocols.
SurfaceAI transforms healthcare processes.
SurfaceAI is a cutting-edge process discovery platform that captures healthcare processes accurately to help healthcare leaders understand:
- What happened? Understand how processes and activities are executed in real-time (e.g. how does a typical working day look like for an ER doctor?)
- Why did it happen? Understand the triggers and circumstances leading to a situation or action (e.g. what was the reason for patients waiting long at the laboratory)
- What will happen? Predict how or when a specific situation will take place (e.g. will the patient take a different course than the normal treatment plan?)
- What is the best that can happen? Identify improvement opportunities (e.g. which activity should be completed first to reduce wait time?)
The advanced process documentation and workflow diagrams help leaders to identify process bottlenecks and improvement opportunities. Talk to our solution experts today to explore how SurfaceAI can help transform your healthcare processes.