Why Automation is Crucial for Healthcare: Introducing Auto-Assign
We’re excited to announce a new automation feature, Auto-Assign! Now, with Auto-Assign, you can eliminate repetitive tasks, reduce manual labor, and help to free up clinical resources for higher-value work.
Use Auto-Assign to save your OR Coordinators and Schedulers time
Clients with an automated scheduling feed can now create an Auto-Assign case template to coordinate their vendors without lifting a finger. No manual touch is needed!
Why is automation so important for healthcare?
Healthcare is arguably one of the most people-led industries. From the patients and doctors receiving and delivering care to the healthcare professionals required to carry out administrative processes, the work of healthcare is extremely people-dependent. According to a 2019 McKinsey Report, from 2001 to 2016, healthcare delivery only contributed 9% of the growth in the US economy, but 29% of the net new jobs. Additionally, McKinsey claims that digitization has a 70% correlation to productivity. In terms of digital adoption, healthcare is considered a lagging sector, only ahead of construction and the arts for both digital adoption and overall productivity.
Why is this a problem?
Even though human interaction at the bedside and operating room is wonderful and essential, asking people to spend time on painstaking and repetitive tasks is not only cost ineffective (and boring 🙂), but more likely to result in errors. Human error has nothing to do with competency or intelligence. Believe it or not, human error is as normal as breathing. Researchers like Dr. Graham Edkins and Dr. Alan Hobbs suggest that regardless of the activity or task being conducted, humans make between 3-6 errors per hour. Dr. Alan Hobbs, formerly part of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, found that aviation maintenance engineers made on average 50 observable errors per work shift. Aviation and health workers have a lot in common – both are highly trained, competent, and often work in situations that impact human life and safety.
Dr. Edkins has a few words of caution on human errors:
- If the system or process is vulnerable and has poor risk controls, even a small error can trigger a serious incident.
- Human error knows no boundaries. Regardless of experience level, professionalism, gender, or culture, everybody makes errors.
How does human error impact the implant supply chain?
The process to procure, prepare, and pay for patient-specific PPI (Bill-Only Materials) is highly manual, and therefore more likely to be error-prone. The processes are also centered on vendor sales representatives. Errors during these processes could result in not having the right materials for a patient’s surgery, delaying surgery, misdocumented items on a patient record, lost revenue, and erroneous payments to vendors. Automation is key to fixing and streamlining broken processes and realigning our most valuable resources, time, and people to higher-value work.
This is why we are so excited for the launch of our new Auto-Assign feature for our Procurement Solution.
Casechek’s Procurement solution has helped clients like you streamline their implant supply chain, providing the tools to manage vendors and inventory through our surgical case coordination and tray management platform.
Auto-Assign, available now!
Stay tuned for more details and future launches as we work to streamline and automate every aspect of your implant supply chain management.
If you have any questions about Auto-Assign, please reach out to your Customer Success Account Manager or email [email protected].