A recent article in Healthcare IT News indicates that investments in healthcare IT can help ‘bail out’ hospital budgets – meaning, hospitals need to make wise decisions in their technology investments to ensure that patient safety and the quality of care are not impacted with impending hospital budget cuts.

The article cites four specific areas that hospitals need to focus on:
• Areas to automate manual tasks
• Opportunities to improve the complex revenue cycle
• Materials management efficiency
• Technologies that offer high and quick ROI

Though these priorities may seem ambitious, a single investment in Business Process Management (BPM) technology can achieve a hospital’s efficiency and ROI goals and improve their quality of patient care by reducing the amount of time needed to manually process tasks.

A few examples of hospitals who took the BPM plunge:

A 238-bed osteopathic teaching hospital located in Grand Rapids, MI for example used BPM to improve the efficiency of key functions in the hospital. These functions included reducing the large amounts of paper used to execute various administrative tasks. Aside from the time required to manually handle and process paperwork, using the previous methods, the hospital staff also lost documents, incurred process delays and had no visibility into the history of a process.

To help drive and manage its important business processes, the hospital has leveraged BPM to automate over 40 processes throughout the organization.

A 442-bed North Carolina not-for-profit hospital also used BPM to facilitate administrative functions including incident reporting, financial planning, job posting,
and employee new hire and termination processes. After automating their organization, the hospital saved money on paper costs, improved access to forms by hospital employees, significantly reduced errors resulting from manual routing issues, and decreased time spent on paper-based administration.

And, now that the new Obama administration has made electronic health records a priority of its stimulus plan, there is definitely a spotlight on healthcare IT. A recent article notes that as much as $20 billion will be pumped in the healthcare system to accelerate this use.

To successfully make this transition and sustain efficiency in a hospital for the years to come, BPM offers healthcare providers a number of benefits and should certainly be a top of mind technology for healthcare CIOs.

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