Discover how to enhance clinical efficiency and patient care by integrating advanced technologies and optimizing workflows for streamlined, cost-effective operations.
Healthcare organizations face the dual challenge of maintaining high-quality patient care while controlling costs. This makes improving efficiency in clinical operations critical, not just for reducing expenses but for optimizing resources and minimizing administrative burdens, allowing healthcare professionals to focus on patient care.
Clinical efficiency is about using resources to meet patient needs while being cost-effective, minimizing waste and maximizing productivity.
Efficient clinical operations lead to:
A major barrier to clinical efficiency is administrative burdens including paperwork, data entry, other manual nonclinical tasks as well as lack of access to all medical imaging that take time away from patient care and increase the risk of errors.
Here are some proven strategies to streamline workflows, reduce errors and enhance patient care.
Studies show clinicians spend 17% of their workweek searching for information across systems, which reduces their time with patients and can contribute to burnout.
Adopting technologies like enterprise document management and enterprise imaging can streamline access to patient records, not stored in the electronic health record (EHR), such as data from ancillary devices and medical images stored in multiple departmental archives.
Integrating these records into EHR workflows allows physicians and other clinicians to quickly access the information they need, freeing up more time for patient care.
Discover how UNC Health integrated enterprise imaging with its electronic health record (EHR).
> Read more | Future-proofing healthcare: AI as a catalyst for change
On average, 71% of organizations’ unstructured patient data and information residing outside of core health information technology apps is inaccessible and unavailable for analysis causing delays, increased workload and inefficiencies.
The solution is to integrate content and medical images within EHR workflows. By leveraging AI-based machine learning (ML), with an enterprise content services platform healthcare providers can automate the classification of patient records received via paper, fax or email. In addition, the establishment of an enterprise imaging platform provides both ubiquitous access to medical images throughout the ecosystem and the foundation to support research within various clinical workflows.
This speeds up clinicians’ access to crucial information and helps them make informed care decisions. For example, implementing a system that automatically digitizes and categorizes incoming records can reduce the time clinicians spend searching for patient information.
Learn more | Managing unstructured clinical content
Asante’s network of care facilities across Oregon and California involves thousands of patients generating about 1.5 million documents a year. This created a need for efficient workflows to expedite processing and manage cost. The health system saved $200,000 in one year and cut processing times up to 90% with Hyland’s Intelligent MedRecords.
Efficient management of health information is essential to maintaining the integrity of patient records and ensuring compliance with regulations. However, manually managing vast amounts of medical data can be complex, time-consuming and prone to errors.
Healthcare providers can simplify health information management using technology solutions to automate the lifecycle of medical records — from scanning and indexing to compliant disposal — and help maintain EHR integrity while saving staff time.
Advanced technologies like AI-powered intelligent document processing (IDP) can revolutionize healthcare by streamlining workflows, ensuring compliance and improving data accuracy. This will help providers balance their administrative duties and continue to provide high-quality healthcare.
Tip: Implementing enterprise document management systems (EDMS) and IDP across the entire medical record lifecycle can save time and improve accuracy.
> Learn more | Streamline digital transformation for the HIM life cycle
Data silos are common in healthcare. They create care blind spots with crucial patient information stored in multiple, disconnected systems. This can lead to delays as clinicians must access several databases and imaging systems to retrieve information.
Providing a single interface to review clinical documents and images greatly improves clinician efficiency and care collaboration. Consolidating data from various sources into one accessible platform helps healthcare providers reduce the time clinicians spend searching for information to make informed care decisions.
Patient portals are an integral part of healthcare, offering patients easy access to their health records, test results and appointment schedules.
Studies show the use of patient portals can increase:
By enabling patients to access, view, share and upload images through portals, healthcare facilities can streamline workflow processes. For example, instead of burning CDs with medical images, health care providers can offer these images in their patient portals, enabling patients to share these images with consulting specialists directly through the portal before their appointment.
Tip: Implementing a robust patient portal that integrates seamlessly with existing EHR systems using an enterprise multispecialty medical imaging viewer like Hyland NilRead can lead to better patient engagement and more efficient workflows.
> Learn more | NilRead for patient portals
The patient intake process can be time-consuming and create bottlenecks.
Enabling patient registration and consent using digital forms on mobile devices or PCs before arrival, reduces wait times and speeds up the intake process. Upgrading mobile and portal technology for digital forms and patient uploads further streamlines patient intake, making the process quicker and more efficient.
Recognizing the importance of patient experience, NYU Langone Health identified the need to digitize their paper-based patient intake process. By transitioning to a paperless registration system, the organization enhanced patient satisfaction via streamlined workflows and increased operational efficiency. Hyland’s solutions played a crucial role in eliminating redundant paperwork and supporting this transformation.
By managing data relationships, documents and processes on a single platform, you can empower clinicians, researchers and other staff to effectively manage cases from inception to completion to support better outcomes. Flexible, low-code technology enables management for many different use cases, such as clinical trials, mental health care and more.
Technology that promotes real-time interactive clinician collaboration of cross-enterprise image communication, speeds second opinions and remote diagnoses. One example is a university medical center managing urgent neurology consults from a remote location for patients around its region. Since the start of its teleneurology program, patients have gained faster access to specialists for stroke diagnoses.
Patients that were experiencing a stroke per the collaborative consults were sent immediately to the university for care. With the success of the teleneurology program, telemedicine capabilities have been extended to other service lines through enhanced image sharing.
It is equally important to consider the needs of clinicians when designing EHR systems. If care workflows should be patient-centric, EHRs interfaces should be designed with the clinician in mind.
A well-designed EHR interface like the Hyland Clinician Window that aligns with clinicians' workflows and is customized to suit their specific needs:
Tip: Work with your EHR provider to customize interfaces that align with your clinicians and workflows.
Selecting reliable technology partners is crucial for the success of any healthcare organization. When selecting technology providers, it's important to look for providers that offer:
Tip: Evaluate potential technology partners based on their ability to integrate with your current systems and their commitment to long-term support and innovation.
— Julie Januski, IT Strategic Partner, Bon Secours Mercy Health
Read the Bon Secours Mercy Health case study.
Continuous improvement is essential for maintaining efficiency in clinical operations. Regularly evaluating clinical performance metrics helps identify inefficiencies and inform improvement strategies.
Gathering feedback from clinicians and staff ensures all stakeholders are involved in enhancing operations, leading to more effective and targeted solutions.
Tip: Accurate classification of records within EHR workflows can accelerate care insights and improve overall efficiency. Regular audits and feedback loops are key to maintaining high performance.
Advanced tools and solutions play a major role in improving clinical operation efficiency, helping healthcare providers streamline processes, reduce administrative burdens and enhance patient care. Here are some ways technology plays a part:
Deploying electronic document management systems (EDMS) and transitioning paper-based and faxed patient records to digital formats can streamline clinician access to complete patient records. Using a VNA to extend access to medical images within EHR workflows ensures that all relevant information is readily available, enabling better-informed care decisions.
Utilizing enterprise document management and AI software can significantly reduce administrative errors and workloads, improving the efficiency of health information management and revenue cycle processes.
This HIMSS report details why the adoption of AI and ML solutions is a logical approach to address pressing challenges in the medical industry.
Yale New Haven Health, a nonprofit healthcare system, conducts 1.3 million imaging studies annually across various departments, emphasizing the need for a robust enterprise medical imaging strategy. To streamline operations and improve clinicians' access to data, the organization adopted AI and ML technologies to analyze large volumes of imaging data efficiently.
By leveraging APIs to extract data directly from the Hyland Acuo VNA solution, they integrated this data into third-party systems using advanced AI algorithms. This “central ingestion” point now serves as the hub for consolidating all clinical data onto a single, easily accessible platform.
Today, Yale New Haven Health depends on this centralized system to provide clinicians with seamless access to critical information, enhancing patient care and operational efficiency across the network.
> Learn more | Read the case study
Yale New Haven Health’s enterprise medical imaging strategy aggregates and manages distinct islands of data for better outcomes.
Hyland Healthcare software solutions are designed to support real-time healthcare delivery by integrating content and medical images within EHR workflows, providing benefits across the board as well as area-specific improvements:
Improving efficiency in clinical operations requires an integration of the latest innovations, optimized workflows and continuous performance measurement.
Hyland Healthcare solutions support this by offering capabilities like content and medical image integration within EHR workflows, intelligent automation of medical records and digital tools to empower clinicians and patients.
> Learn more | Hyland Healthcare software solutions
