Opinion: Intelligent Solutions for Healthcare Shortages

Our healthcare industry is in dire need of a cure. With pressure on healthcare facilities, due to staff shortages and healthcare demands, we need to take a closer look at the processes within the industry to apply innovative solutions.

Key tasks that take up valuable staff time are:

1. Admissions and registration paperwork
2. Maintaining medical records and electronic health Information
3. Emergency room document management
4. In-patient information tracking and updating
5. Mailroom and organisation of all incoming documentation
6. Accounts payable and finance

If we take a closer look at the basic functionality of healthcare operations, such as accounts payable and finance, and apply the power of innovation and intelligent automation (IA), we can implement a smarter way to work, relieving some of the burden placed on exhausted staff. Staff are then given time back to provide more quality patient care, while being confident their information is quickly and securely distributed, reducing costs in the process.

Australia’s fastest-growing medical centre group, Myhealth’s uptake of IA in their finance department, has removed the burden on staff managing the over-load of invoices. The organisation’s accounts payable (AP) function was under strain and required one full-time worker to process around 1,500 invoices per month for 50 clinics.

With their continued growth, they needed a more cost-effective and time-reducing solution.

“In the past, around 80 per cent of our AP team’s day was consumed with processing invoices”, explains Ferdia Doherty, Financial Controller for Myhealth group. “Today, that’s all changed. We’ve reduced the time spent on invoice processing by 30 per cent, even though our invoice volumes are continuing to grow from 1,500 invoices for 50 clinics when we started the project, to 2,000 per month from around 100 clinics today.”

Applying this solution across key areas within healthcare, we can reduce the amount spent on manual tasks that take away from patient care. Importantly, we also make space for reduced costs, allowing a greater budget to be spent on patient care, helping ease some of the burdens that currently exist in healthcare.

Andrew Mellor

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In his role as Regional Vice President for ANZ, Andrew Mellor has over 30 years of enterprise software experience spanning Europe and Asia. Over the last 15 years, Andrew has held leadership roles in Australia at companies including NetSuite, Oracle and Qualtrics prior to joining Kofax in 2019. He’s passionate about helping customers grow through innovation and has worked across many industries including financial services, manufacturing, supply chain and telecommunications. Andrew earned a Diploma in Electronic engineering at Hertfordshire University in the UK.

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