Mistakes happen. Whether it’s as simple as serving the wrong order to your booth or something more extensive like leaving the fire screen open, mistakes happen. But when it comes to the world of healthcare, even the most minor errors can have the most devastating consequences.
Even in our tech-driven world, health providers still fill out a staggering amount of 20,000 forms manually each year. This ultimately forces organizations to spend more time and resources on simple tasks and revising administrative errors. Not only does this cripple productivity, but it also wastes valuable time that could be focused on your patients and their well-being.
But what if it didn’t have to be this way? What if you could lighten your administrative burden while ensuring your data is collected and stored correctly? Automation in data entry can make this possible.
Over the past several years, automation technology has spread like wildfire over various industries and sectors, streamlining typical day-to-day administrative tasks. By implementing automation within your data entry process, your practice could easily avoid the following burdens:
- Medical Errors
- Incorrect information
- High administrative costs
- Missing results
Data automation also offers an assortment of benefits, such as:
- Reduced error rates
- Better patient experience
- Reduced administrative burden and cost
- Streamlined process increases productivity
For this article, we’ll take a comprehensive look at the implementation of data automation as well as take a deep dive into the benefits of data automation and the pitfalls of manual data entry.
Manual Data Entry Challenges
As your practice grows, the volume and variety of your data increases and expands. And just coming off the heels of the Public Health Emergency (which is planned to end this May), many practices are experiencing a drastic shift in their patient count, leading to an increase in data intake. When a practice relies on manual data entry, they run the risk of medical errors and other inevitable costs that can damage its stream of revenue. Not only can these costs affect your practice’s revenue and efficiency, but they can also negatively impact the patient’s experience, thus ruining a practice’s reputation.
All of the challenges we listed above come with their own set of implications and consequences. For example, medical errors and missing results from manual data entry directly impact the patient experience and how care is delivered. Without the proper information, a practice is at risk of providing inadequate care for its patients. All just because someone entered the wrong number or statistic. On the other side of these challenges are issues that directly impact your practice’s financial success. Due to the time and effort manual data entry requires, most practices are stuck with high administrative costs with little to no ROI. And because of how extensive this task can be, physicians often spend more time on mundane tasks such as filing insurance claims or recording test results, limiting the time they spend with their patients.
These prominent pain points reveal glaring flaws in the outdated manual data entry process, begging the question of how a practice solves these problems once and for all. And the solution is simple: automation.
Benefits of Data Automation
There are numerous ways in which a practice can implement data automation, most of which involve the use of EHR systems and digitizing paper documents. But how does a practice optimize these strategies? Below are some of the top benefits of data automation:
- Reduced Error Rates: Even the most skilled physicians make data entry mistakes. It’s only human nature when you’re staring at a screen, entering information all day. Data automation, however, doesn’t have the same restrictions we do. Instead, these systems monitor your data day and night to ensure accuracy, limiting the amount of data errors in your practice.
- Patient Experience Improvement: As physicians spend more time manually inputting their data, they spend less time with their patients. By removing the need for medical staff to enter data manually, data automation carries the heavy lifting, giving you and your practice the time it needs to focus on your patients.
- Cost Control: The more mistakes you make, the more it costs. It’s only simple math. But with data automation, fewer errors means less time backtracking to fix data entry mistakes and less money required to ensure your practice’s data is accurate.
- Increased Productivity and Streamlined Process: When you automate your data entry, you end up streamlining the entire process, freeing up your time to focus on other tasks, such as tending to your patients. This, in turn, will boost the productivity of your entire practice.
It’s important to know that these are not all of the benefits associated with data automation. In addition to these benefits, data automation has always been praised for its interoperability with other systems in PALTC practices, with some automating all their processes. For more information on data automation, specifically in EHRs, click here.
Data Automation Wrapped-Up
Making the most of data automation requires a great deal of understanding and knowledge. Learning from the challenges of manual data entry is essential to use data automation to its fullest potential. In addition, knowing the current trends and benefits of data automation is crucial to gain any success from it.
For more information on data automation and medical data processing, click here for further information.