In the fast-paced world of healthcare, where every minute counts and efficiency is crucial, staying ahead of the curve is essential.  

Enter business process automation (BPA) – a game-changing solution that empowers healthcare organizations to streamline operations, enhance patient care, and drive sustainable success.  

In this blog post, we’ll explore why embracing automation is not just a smart move but a necessity for healthcare organizations in 2023 and beyond. So, let’s delve into the world of automation and discover the transformative power it holds for healthcare. 

1. Prioritising Efficiency 

In healthcare, every second counts. By automating routine and repetitive tasks, healthcare organizations can free up precious time for their staff to focus on what truly matters – delivering exceptional patient care.  

Imagine a world where appointments are scheduled seamlessly, patient registration is a breeze, and paper forms are a thing of the past.  

With process automation, healthcare organizations can bid farewell to administrative headaches and focus on actively improving their customer and employee experiences. 

2. Safeguarding Patient Confidentiality 

In an era where data breaches send shivers down our spines, safeguarding patient information is non-negotiable.  

Process automation software works to fortify your defences and keep sensitive data under lock and key.  

With a meticulous attention to accuracy and strict security protocols, digital forms and confidential workflows can ensure that patient confidentiality remains unbreachable.  

Say goodbye to misspelled names and misplaced files, and hello to peace of mind. 

3. Streamlining Processes 

Picture this: a busy healthcare organization bustling with activity, doctors rushing from one patient to another, administrative staff buried under piles of paperwork, and files seemingly playing hide-and-seek. 

Process automation software can bring order to this chaos by streamlining those key workflows and documents.  

From patient onboarding to appointment scheduling and inventory management, automation sweeps through the corridors of healthcare organizations, ensuring seamless processes and minimizing delays caused by human error. 

4. Putting Care at the Forefront 

The patient experience lies at the heart of every healthcare organization.  

Automation can play a pivotal role in enhancing this experience by automating various touchpoints along the patient journey.  

From personalized appointment reminders and follow-up communications to seamless information sharing between departments, BPA ensures that patients receive timely, accurate, and coordinated care, leading to higher patient satisfaction levels. 

5. Cost Savings 

In today’s healthcare landscape, optimizing costs is a pressing challenge.  

No-code process automation offers a tangible solution for organisations, by reducing operational expenses and optimizing resource allocation.  

By automating tasks that would otherwise be super manual, healthcare organizations can minimize staffing needs, decrease the likelihood of errors and rework, and allocate their valuable resources more efficiently, leading to significant cost savings in the long run. 

6. Scalability and Adaptability 

Healthcare is an ever-evolving industry, with new technologies, regulations, and patient demands constantly shaping the landscape.  

Process automation provides healthcare organizations with the agility to adapt to these changes swiftly and seamlessly.  

Whether it’s incorporating new processes, or accommodating evolving compliance standards, automation ensures that healthcare organizations can keep pace with the dynamic nature of the industry. 

7. Informed Decision-Making 

Data-driven decision-making is the bedrock of success in healthcare.  

Automation can help you harness the power of data analytics, providing valuable insights into operations, patient trends, and financial performance.  

By automating data collection, analysis, and reporting, automation can help your team empower stakeholders to make informed decisions, drive continuous improvement, and achieve better patient and employee outcomes. 

In an industry where every second counts and patient well-being is paramount, healthcare organizations cannot afford to overlook the transformative potential of business process automation.  

By embracing process automation, these organizations can unlock a new era of efficiency, data security, enhanced patient experiences, cost savings, and adaptability.  

Embracing automation allows healthcare organizations to elevate their operations, deliver exceptional care, and thrive in an increasingly competitive landscape.  

Flexibility  

You don’t want a solution that ties you down to a rigid process.   

We’ve seen our fair share of horror stories about teams spending thousands of dollars getting processes automated just for those processes to change. Again and again.  

True continuous process improvement comes from identifying ways we can improve a process, not just automating it and never touching it again because it’s too expensive.  

Look for software that can adapt to changes in your business or industry, preferably a tool that allows you to make changes on the fly.  

Scalability   

You don’t want a solution that crumbles like a house of cards when you start to grow. With a lot of process automation tools, big ambitions can mean high costs and extensive resources.  

Don’t just think about your current needs, but also think about where you want your business to be in the next few years.  

Say you’re only able to automate one process a year. In that case, you likely won’t seeany real process improvement momentum and struggle to justify the investment.  

Look for software that allows you to scale your automation efforts – this could be the difference between automating 30 processes in a year or 2.  

Visibility 

Visibility is crucial when choosing a workflow automation solution.  

Just because your processes are mapped that doesn’t mean they’re being followed. 

You need to be able to see where you are in a process, who’s responsible for the next step, and when it’s due.  

Look for a solution that will provide you with a clear and intuitive view of your workflows, allowing you to easily track progress, identify bottlenecks, and adjust as needed. 

So, there you have it! Choosing the best process automation solution for your business is a big decision. However, if you consider these six factors, you should be able to find a solution that makes your life easier and helps you work smarter, not harder.  

When evaluating different solutions, remember to prioritize ease of use, flexibility, compatibility, scalability, analytics and reporting, and customer support. And don’t forget to think about your unique business needs and processes when making your final decision.  

With the right process automation solution in place, you can say goodbye to tedious tasks and hello to more time to focus on what really matters – growing your business and creating incredible customer and employee experiences. 

It’s easy to miss the signs that your business is suffering from process issues. 

Most of the time, you don’t know you have a problem until someone points it out.  

Maybe they’ve been waiting on an approval for weeks or can’t find an important email lost in hundreds of threads in their inbox.  

Maybe they can’t see what stage a task is at, delaying projects across multiple departments. 

Or maybe they skip a step in a crucial process, requiring a start from scratch. 

Businesses will often brush off these issues as ‘one-offs’ and not worth fixing (especially if it requires IT resource). But the truth is, a poorly designed process is a breeding ground for future problems, especially as businesses scale. 

So how do you know when your business might be in need of some help in the process department? 

Luckily for you, we’ve identified some key warning signs you should be looking out for. 

Maybe Jen didn’t correctly fill out the form with the right info. Or maybe she didn’t attach the PDF to her email. Maybe her manager has 1,000 other emails to check before getting to hers.  

Meanwhile, there is no actual system pushing the workflow forward, just a whole bunch of people you hope will follow the process and do their part. 

In the smaller scheme of things this isn’t a big issue. A few delayed approvals here and there. But as your organisation grows and employee expectations increase, paper and email-based processes can start to crumble.  

2. Processes are documented but tasks  are still being skipped  

You’ve spent a bunch of time creating the best process map of all time.  

Now you have the ultimate work of business process art. And nobody follows it.

If people are skipping steps in a process or completely ignoring a process altogether, you’ve got a process issue. 

We love process mapping, in fact, it’s a big part of our platform. However, just because a process is mapped doesn’t mean the process is being followed. 

Automation can help you identify the underlying issues and bottlenecks in your processes. What if the process is too complicated? What if a step is being skipped because the process involves someone or something completely irrelevant?  

Automating the process helps you see exactly where your processes are going wrong – allowing you to rapidly iterate and improve both your workflows and your employee experiences. 

Could you report on compliance without spending days collating stacks of paper or sifting through email threads? Would you be able to identify where a CAPEX request is at without following up with a bunch of different people?  

Add a remote working element to it and many businesses are essentially running around with their eyes closed. 

If the only person across a process is the person currently dealing with it – you’ll benefit from a workflow automation solution. 

4. Your team are spending way too much time on manual tasks

I know what you might be thinking – if we automate manual tasks, we’ll be taking jobs away from our people.

Or we’ll be replacing our people with robots! Not exactly. 

For many businesses automation is the difference between your people doing more and doing less, not doing something and doing nothing. 

If a customer sends in a refund request, automation could be the difference between getting a refund in a few hours vs. a few weeks. 

With paper and email-based processes your team could be spending hours and hours searching email threads, matching up data and delivering paper approvals to their managers.  

Not a great experience for customers. And all that admin drives your employees up the wall. 

With automation you can free up your employees to work on the things that matter. 

This allows them to give back to the business, focusing their time on improvements rather than BAU. 

So, if you’re waiting on approvals, skipping steps in processes or unsure where they’re sitting, or if your team are just bogged down day in and day out with unnecessary manual tasks, you’ll benefit from process automation. 

The power of process automation allows you to fix all these problems (and identify other process issues you didn’t even know you had), but it can also be a costly and IT-intensive undertaking. 

With Flowingly, you can accomplish this without the need for developers, empowering your non-technical teams to automate their very own processes, which they know inside out and run every day. 

Don’t just take our word for it either. 

At Todd Energy, they have automated 13 processes in just 6 months, turning processes like onboarding, which were run out of Excel spreadsheets, into streamlined digital experiences. 

Glenelg Shire Council are saving 80+ weeks of admin every year, with some processes dropping from an hour to 10 minutes’ worth of admin. 

Flowingly gives your employees the tools they need to improve the way they work and create real, significant change within the organisation. 

Before Steph, Digital Improvement Lead at Todd Energy, automated their staff and contractor onboarding process, it would take 6+ hours to complete.

Now, it only takes 2, no longer relying on spreadsheets, back & forth emails and individuals’ memory.

See how Steph this and what the feedback has been like in the organisation in the snippet below.

Transcript

I guess a great example of that is the staffing contractor onboarding flow.

And you have touched on that already a little bit, Sean.

But prior to us automating this process it would take upwards of six hours on and off for us to onboard a new staff or contractor, and I guess it was run out of an Excel workbook.

If I’m completely honest with you, It had some templated emails in it, but there was lots of backwards and force and a huge reliance on individuals to remember what was going on and to keep that process ticking.

Honestly it took me about 20 hours to build that process. It’s quite a meaty one.

And it was probably our first more high complex process that we built.

We had some pretty amazing engagement and ownership with the lovely ladies that run that process.

And I asked them post go-live, ‘just gut feel how much time is this saving you now?’ And they estimate between three and four hours.

So three and four hours per new start is a pretty decent saving I think.

And the feedback from them was along the lines of ‘I don’t need to remember where the process is at and the system just keeps it on track and I get the notifications when I need to do something’, which I guess in turn allows them to provide more value add to the business.

So yeah, each team has got a bit of a mix of simple and complex processes that I guess keeps us working in the trees.

We’ve spoken about working in the weeds a little bit.

But I guess continuing to push and improve once those processes are in and rolled out to, and tying back to that first statement, making a plan and a roadmap, socializing it and holding yourselves to account, that’s really key.

The question of process mapping vs process automation comes up all the time when figuring out how to tackle a business process problem. Do you start with a process mapping project? Does automation feel like a next step? What is it you really want to change for your organisation?

In our recent webinar, Jemma discussed how her team at Glenelg Shire Council tackled these questions. Watch the 3 min video snippet below (or read the transcript)

Transcript

We had a whole raft of projects that we were launching over the next 5 years. The biggest things for us for automation were:

• Process knowledge existing only in the brains of staff, which is a huge organisational risk.
• Building on that, at council we have cupboards full of well intentioned procedures and maps that we create and then immediately start to diverge from
• And primarlily, customer experience.

So we’re a large square km, low population Local Government Authority. Giving every staff and community member the same customer experience when interacting with us was so important. It’s also important to note that we started this project pre-covid, but all of this was obviously reinforced by the pandemic, so it’s aligned really closely to our pandemic response.

Q: A lot of Local Governments go down that path of process mapping as well, and automation almost seems like a step too far or a futuristic piece. Why was it that you went down a different path there? I know you’ve mapped processes before, but why have you tackled this problem with Automation at the forefront?

For me it was about delivering a tangible benefit to our organisation that can be understood by all levels of our organisation.

When the project team or transformation team was brought on board by Digital Glenelg, we inherited a whole bunch of process maps, great work that people prior to us in the organisation had done.

What we found is that when you went talk to staff about them, that experience of what they did currently was different., So I really wanted this project to be something live, that didn’t require project artefacts to be kept off to the side,.

Right from the get go when asking for resource from the organisation, I really wanted to be able to say “If you give X to this project then we’ll deliver Y” .

For the “Delivery of Y”, I use the ASOS example. When you buy something from ASOS, you get a notification that your order has been selected, packed, pickjed and then it goes off to Australia Post. Then you get all those communitactions; it’s being shipped, it’s out for delivery today, it has been delivered.

So for us it was about procuring a product that sent those notifications out for us; it was about “the postie should be delivering the mail”, not stopping to call people to tell them their mail was coming today. That for me, was where I saw the value for our organisation of this project.

The best process improvement initiative is the one that gets done.

It’s simple. The best type of process improvement initiative at your company is the one that gets done.

Not the major project that you keep talking about but never action. Not the “current-state” process mapping exercise that ticks a box but has no follow-up actions.

No.

The BEST type is the one that you action.

Where you ship improvements.

For process improvement to have a true impact, your employees need to be able to touch and feel it. They need to feel the impact of those improvements in their everyday working life, no matter how big or small.

Process improvement is affected by momentum. By regularly shipping improvements – even the smallest improvements – you begin to build a culture of change.

We see this with our own clients. It’s why Flowingly often starts off being used by a single department and within 2 years is used company-wide. Because the Operations team starts automating some processes, then the HR team takes a peek, then Sales, Finance and so on.

When they ask how the other team did it, the answer is simple. “We started.”

This applies to both methodologies and platforms.

Lean, Six Sigma, Kaizen, Agile. They all work.

No-code, low-code, mapping, mining, RPA. They all work too.

Each of these methodologies and platform types will have an impact when done well.

The question you need to ask is “which one can we action?”

Bonus for making it this far…

Here are some tips for creating effective process improvement initiatives in your organization.

1. Be honest about your constraints

Got a decent sized team of developers? Great. All of the platform types listed above are options to you.

If not, cross off low-code, RPA and process mining.

Genuine support and vision for process improvement from the exec team? Business-wide process mapping is a great option.

If not, don’t even try.

Be very honest with yourself about your constraints. Without acknowledging them, you will end up with false starts and inaction.

2. Focus on consistency

What can the business continuously maintain over the coming years?

What can you consistently deploy?

You want to choose a tool that works for you today AND in 2 years’ time.

You might have a couple of weeks in January to dedicate to building that highly-integrated, uber-automated workflow. But will you then be swamped with BAU for the rest of the year?

Consistent effort is key to process improvement.

3. Get started

Action creates momentum.

Many of the successful process initiatives that I have seen are business-driven. Often, they are started by one or two people who are fed up with the status quo.

Every business needs doers.

You hear commentators mention it on the sports field all the time. “She really leads by example”. What they are saying is that she is doing the right things, and the others are inspired to follow.

The same goes in the workplace.

4. And once you’ve done this…keep improving

No process is perfect. No way.

Focus on shipping improvements – not aiming for perfection.

Maybe it’s making a process slightly more streamlined by removing an unnecessary step. Maybe it’s automating an approval that takes your team 10 minutes every day.

By continuously shipping improvements you will begin to build a culture of continuous improvement within yourself and the people around you.