4 ways to enhance healthcare efficiency

Many hospitals and health systems are dealing with tight budgets, workforce challenges, and security issues. These and other challenges are getting increasingly complex and adding strain to an already-taxed healthcare ecosystem. How do you decide whether to invest in patients or care teams—or deliver optimal care or achieve your financial goals?

In this complicated environment, it can be difficult to avoid getting distracted by minutiae, bureaucracy, and manual efforts. The industry’s Quadruple Aim framework helps many organizations clarify their priorities and zero in on best practices for healthcare efficiency.

Healthcare organizations need time to focus on what matters most: improving care delivery. ServiceNow is helping organizations bring the Quadruple Aim to life to give more time back to care teams.

1. Enhance patient experience

Good patient experiences begin with speed to information. This means easy access, proactive communication, fast updates, and fewer forms. These enhancements can go a long way toward creating a foundation of trust between clinicians and patients.

Before care teams can deliver on these improved experiences, however, they must conquer technical hurdles such as data silos, manual processes, and data privacy and compliance rules. Complete, 360-degree views of patient data, reduced delays, improved patient privacy, and eliminated task redundancies can transform a lackluster patient experience into a high-quality, meaningful encounter.

2. Promote care team well-being

It’s difficult to focus on what matters when you’re short on staff or enduring an onslaught of low-value tasks. The good news is that technology solutions can streamline these manual processes.

Many healthcare providers are finding relief through process automation, simplified clinician onboarding, and reduced paper workflows. These improvements can prevent clinician burnout, improve clinician satisfaction, and add immediate value to the patient experience.

3. Improve population health

Taking a macro view can help healthcare providers get in front of crises, address population-wide trends and needs, and support aging populations. This will require addressing bigger, systemic challenges such as training, communication, and flexible workflows and systems.

Solutions center on connecting siloed data and disparate systems. Data-driven visibility and automated administrative workloads can help increase efficiency and improve decision-making so that care teams can provide more accurate, effective care across communities.

For example, one of Europe’s largest hospitals had data scattered across multiple systems in multiple formats, making surgery coordination overly complex. With ServiceNow, the hospital created a real-time view of data that simplified surgery coordination for 1 million yearly treatments and expedited more accurate surgery response.

4. Reduce costs

Transformation in healthcare will occur when we can connect positive outcomes to spending and waste. Improving efficiency requires reducing administrative tasks, making better use of data, and embracing innovative technologies such as AI.

Healthcare providers are choosing technology solutions that automate manual tasks, reduce downtime, and address process inefficiencies.

Improving the quality of healthcare

The healthcare industry needs to find more time, waste less effort, and drive down costs to improve the quality of care. Providers shouldn’t have to choose between investing in patients or care teams. Technologies such as hyperautomation can help them do both.

Hyperautomation helps accelerate back-office administrative tasks, connect data silos, and enable hyperpersonalized experiences for patients—while reducing costs and inefficiencies. It empowers IT teams to deliver innovative, timesaving, and cost-saving solutions quickly—in days, not months.

Find out more about how ServiceNow helps healthcare organizations make the Quadruple Aim reality.