Healthcare providers are always under the pressure to provide better care at affordable rates. Technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA), make that possible. Due to shortage of medical staff and a rise in aging population, hospitals and clinics are being forced to adopt technology.

King’s Daughters Medical Center, a small rural hospital with 99-beds, has recently deployed automation to reconcile electronic health records (EHRs). The result has been satisfactory. It has started saving up to 34 clinician hours per month and US$11,000 in nursing productivity over 12 months. This effort has also helped to bring down re-admission rates from 6.2 percent to 5.5 percent at the rural hospital.

King’s Daughters’ Clinical Applications Coordinator Joe Farr said that frequently, this results in missing ‘sigs’ – the critical shorthand prescribing instructions. This means the difference between a ‘qhs’ being interpreted as ‘every hour’ instead of ‘nightly at bedtime.’

The result is catastrophic if it’s not sorted out, which is why administrative staff and nurses spend several hours on phone and the computer to fix and sort the records.

Farr says, the process is not only time consuming but susceptible to human error. King’s Daughters focused on improving patient safety and streamline the medication reconciliation process by automating the transcription of sig data into the EHR.

Based on 19,390 annual patient visits and an average of five medications per patient, the resulting time savings of 34 hours per month for clinicians, translates into about $11,000 in recaptured nursing productivity over 12 months.

This justifies the minimal investment of time and resources necessary to deploy the solution. King’s Daughters’ overall 30-day re-admission rate fell by 11.3 percent.

Farr’s team was shown a two- minute video to educate staff to understand how to use automation and show them why it’s in their interest to leverage it.