How Intelligent Automation Can Improve Care Coordination, Management

March 21, 2022 - Successful care delivery and management depend on timely and accurate data to inform effective clinical decision-making, but too often the availability of this information remains locked in unstructured formats requiring manual intervention to extract. However, advancements in artificial intelligence, namely natural language processing, can serve as a key to unlocking insight and reducing the administrative burden on providers.

“Healthcare continues to look for ways to automate workflows in order to reduce the manual work that so many healthcare organizations wind up with,” says Consensus Chief Operating Officer John Nebergall. “Natural language processing is a technology most people associate with smartphones and smart devices, but its ability to extract data and provide context from text has tremendous potential for healthcare.”

This application on NLP opens the door to workflow process enhancement such as robotic process automation (RPA), which the healthcare industry has shown a large appetite for as it prepares for a post-pandemic reality.

“Not only can I structure unstructured documents, but I can also streamline the workflow around making that information available to physicians on patient charts, physician task lists, or referrals, savings tons of time and frankly improving the accuracy because manual processes are rife with errors that need to be corrected. Automation reduces the number of errors and enables real efficiency,” Nebergall adds.

Despite these technological achievements, health data exchange efforts fall short of enabling key clinical data from directly impacting care as patients move between providers and settings. Take, for instance, a patient seeking treatment for a broken wrist following an accident at an urgent care center. Even though the facility is likely to have an EMR, it communicates with the patient’s primary care physician and payer via fax.

“So when I fax the information, I have fulfilled my responsibility to inform the right providers and payers of what just occurred,” Nebergall explains. “The problem is that the onus is on the receiving end to have processes in place to make that data meaningful. Now it might be that my office isn’t that busy and the doctor can just walk over to the fax machine and read the report, but from what I’ve seen, that’s not real life.”

Without intelligent systems in place, information waits to be acted upon by a human being. But an alternative is not only possible — it can be achieved today thanks to the evolution of NLP and machine learning capabilities.

“It doesn’t matter where that provider is. They’ve got their mobile devices; they’ve got their mobile phones. They’ve got instances of their care technology running on those devices so they can react to that without having to worry about going into the office or waiting for something to be keyed in,” Nebergall observes.

With timely and accurate data in hand, the patient’s PCP can quickly make informed care decisions to refer the patient to surgery and reduce time to care, enabling a positive experience for both patient and provider.

“Applying AI to all those pieces of unstructured data reduces turnaround from days to hours or even minutes,” Nebergall emphasizes. “A patient could be in the urgent care center in the morning and check into the surgery center in the afternoon to alleviate pain and ensure a positive outcome, the hallmark of truly patient-centered care.”

With patients demanding improved access to care and healthcare organizations facing provider shortages, intelligent automation can enable new levels of care coordination and management that are essential to quality improvements and reduced costs.

“A lack of real-time communication means physicians, multiple specialties, and payers are limited in their ability to collaborate on the care of a given patient. Simply put, somebody knows something that somebody else doesn’t and different decisions are made,” notes Nebergall.

“As technology is applied here, everybody is working off the same information at the same time. Disparities in opinions of a care coordination team generally don’t come from different points of view for the same set of information but from different information that leads people to different points of view. We can be a lot more specific about how we think about what care this patient needs when we’re all operating from the same set of information.”

Reducing the need for manual intervention around health data exchange will free providers, specialists, and payers to focus on delivering a care experience that benefits all stakeholders. But it remains essential that healthcare organizations identify a strategic technology partner and solution that works with their existing workflows and health IT infrastructure.

“Organizations need the right partner, one that understands the clinical environment and the ways technology can help,” Nebergall advises. “This isn’t about needing to upgrade an entire server system but ensuring that systems can correctly translate and interpret structured messages to support workflows that improve care delivery. The smarter your interface is, the more timely and more accurate the information is going to be”

With advancements in AI occurring rapidly, partnerships are crucial to healthcare organizations maximizing the best use of their technology and achieving the intended results of improved productivity and outcomes. Additionally, as the technology continues to be fed richer and richer data sources, its applications across healthcare are likely to expand and accelerate.

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About Consensus Cloud Solutions, Inc.

Consensus Cloud Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ: CCSI) is a global leader of digital technology for secure information transport. The company leverages its technology heritage to provide secure solutions that transform simple digital documents into actionable information, including advanced healthcare standards HL7 and FHIR for secure data exchange. Consensus offers eFax Corporate, a leading global cloud faxing solution; Consensus Signal for automatic real-time healthcare communications; Consensus Clarity, a Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence solution; Consensus Unite and Consensus Harmony interoperability solutions; and jSign for secure digital signatures built on blockchain. For more information about Consensus, visit consensus.com and follow @ConsensusCS on Twitter.

To learn more, visit go.consensus.com/clarity