A turn for the better: Intelligent health operations
July 25, 2018
July 25, 2018
Healthcare continues to change in dramatic and often unpredictable ways. It’s a scramble for organizations in the industry to simply keep up.
For many healthcare businesses, operations are a tangle of complex and disconnected technologies and processes, making it hard to manage costs, improve service quality and become more consumer-centric.
What’s the answer? Accenture research identifies three keys to transforming healthcare organizations: make operations more “intelligent” to transform key business processes; make better decisions, faster; and create more compelling customer experiences.
In this paper, we discuss the key elements of intelligent operations and how healthcare organizations can get on the path to building them.
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The intelligent operations healthcare organizations need to compete and grow are driven by a mix of critical elements: innovative talent, rich data, applied intelligence, cloud and ecosystem partnerships.
Combined the right way, these elements enable organizations to transform business processes and make better decisions, more quickly and confidently.
Consider the healthcare claims process, for example. Through digital monitoring tools, intelligent operations alert processors about claims that may be stranded in inventory a few days shy of entering the penalty box. Digital alerts can prevent the insurer from incurring late-payment interest charges and help avoid fielding calls from providers inquiring about payment status.
Transforming processes through intelligent operations, and creating the tools that support them, requires a fundamental understanding of several key details:
Once these items are understood, human ingenuity will be needed to build and manage these automation tools—and these uniquely human skills will become even more critical as organizations deploy data analytics to create deep, actionable insights and use more advanced technologies to manage processes.
In fact, with increased automation, an organization’s process experts will gradually change roles, moving from processor to decision maker, making conclusions based on the data the AI tools present and taking appropriate actions.
The starting point for a move to intelligent operations is an end-to-end review of an organization’s operations to determine what should be updated, replaced, eliminated or automated based on desired business outcomes.
Once that’s completed, an organization can define a road map for how it should approach three keys to making their operations more intelligent:
The infographic below outlines why healthcare organizations must transform their operations now.
View the infographicThe healthcare industry faces an inflection point: Established players must address escalating costs and consumer expectations, while also watching for upstarts with big disruptive potential.