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5 Simple Tasks You Can Automate in Your Behavioral Healthcare Organization
There are plenty of ways to utilize data to improve your behavioral healthcare organization, including improving treatment plans, patient communication, and revenue cycle management (RCM). But some of the easiest and least time-intensive ways you can enhance your operational effectiveness is by automating simple tasks.
There is no shortage of data in today’s healthcare practices. Thanks to more sophisticated electronic health records (EHRs) and recognized data collection points, such as the social determinants of health (SDOH), clinics are sitting on a goldmine of information. The problem is no longer about getting the data, it’s about effectively utilizing it.
Scheduling
The idea of sending automated communication to remind patients of appointments has become mainstream, and this type of artificial intelligence (AI) is extremely simple. When a patient has an appointment, the patient will receive texts or emails on a set schedule reminding them of it. This basic patient communication has helped reduce no-shows significantly for clinics.
However, this process can easily be improved further with data, as most clinics still spend a lot of hours on manual scheduling management. Instead of just informing patients they have an appointment coming up and asking them to please contact the office if they need to reschedule, it’s possible to link to your calendar and use automation that lets patients reschedule appointments themselves. Clinics already have this data, and simple automations can improve patient communication and make it significantly easier for patients to reschedule.
Follow-Up
When a patient doesn’t show up for an appointment, it typically falls to the administrative staff to contact the patient and follow up to reschedule. This is a process that easily can be automated. A scheduling or EHR system can trigger an automation that alerts the patient their appointment was missed and offer them a simple link to reschedule. This significantly reduces the administrative burden of scheduling management.
Managing Prescription/Refills
Many patients already likely receive an automated text message from their drug store informing them that a refill prescription is due. This same type of automation around data could easily be utilized more often by behavioral healthcare clinics. The dates of when prescriptions are due is common data stored within any EHR. Clinics can easily use this data to get ahead of the process – informing patients to schedule necessary appointments, alerting physicians to create refills, and reporting on discrepancies.
Patient Questionaries
When healthcare providers design a treatment plan, there are often questions and updates that patients need to answer or provide at regular intervals, depending on the diagnosis. Many of these types of regular inputs are linked to the social determinants of health. These types of questions can easily be automated and sent to the client within an EHR where answers can be tracked, and automated tasks can be created to follow up via phone or during patient visits. Using data, clinics can create simple reports of tasks that need to be completed around patient data collection.
Missing Data Points
To most clinical staff, missing data is obvious and their EHR likely already alerts them to what has been omitted. However, gathering excluded data points can be further automated. Alerts can be added on top of clinician’s notes to collect necessary data points and automated texts, or emails can be sent to patients to ask them to provide such details, which can then be automatically added into the EHR.
Conclusion
Despite regular information available to behavioral health practices about harnessing the power of automation, there is continual resistance and lack of awareness about simple tasks that could be automated.
People are creatures of habit, and this includes physicians and clinical staff. Automation in general has met with cultural resistance in the last decade, with many hesitant to adopt over fear of losing control, lack of personalization or mistakes being made. However, numerous studies have continued to show that automating tasks equals fewer errors and improved patient communication.
Steps such as automated appointment reminders have become mainstream, but many more simple tasks could easily be further improved with automation. It all starts with data that clinics already have. The possibilities truly are endless.
Khalid Al-Maskari is CEO and Founder of Health Information Management Systems (HiMS).
The views expressed in Perspectives are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Behavioral Healthcare Executive, the Psychiatry & Behavioral Health Learning Network, or other Network authors. Perspectives entries are not medical advice.
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