From Friction to Flow: Transforming Clinical Environments with Automated Innovations

I think one of the most important things is just for folks to be curious about what's actually happening on the front lines [Music] hello everyone and welcome to the strategy of Health podcast from the American Journal of Healthc Care Strategy my name is Cole Lions and I'm here today with Dr Mary Smith who is the Chief Information officer for a major health system in the Midwest Dr Smith welcome to the podcast thank you so much Cole happy to be here great to have you um Dr Smith we've been talking a lot about automation recently and how it can improve clinical workflows you implemented an automated system in your hospitals recently can you tell us a little bit about that project and what problem you were trying to solve yeah absolutely so like many Health Systems we were facing a huge issue with burnout among our nurses and clinicians um they were spending so much of their time on administrative tasks documentation hunting for supplies just things that were taking them away from direct patient care um we did a Time study and found that you know upwards of 30 40% of their shift was spent on non-clinical work so we wanted to look at how we could use technology specifically Automation and some robotics to take that burden off of them um so we implemented a system for automated supply delivery um using autonomous mobile robots and also looked at automating some of the documentation piece through ambient listening technology reducing the pajama time as they call it um and the goal was really just to let nurses be nurses and let doctors be doctors that's that's fantastic and I love that phrase let nurses be nurses um what were the results I mean did you see a tangible difference in in satisfaction or efficiency oh huge absolutely um you know within the first 6 months we saw a significant drop in um overtime hours because people were getting their work done during their shift um our satisfaction scores among staff went up measurably um and interestingly patient satisfaction also went up because the nurses had more time to spend at the bedside just talking to the patient explaining things not rushing in and out um so it really was a win-win um but it wasn't without its challenges you know implementing new tech always has a learning curve uh but once they saw the benefit they were fully on board that's that's great to hear and I think that point about patient satisfaction rising is is a key one that people often miss when they think about efficiency they think oh it's going to be impersonal but it actually frees up the human to be more human um what's next for you guys in terms of automation are you looking at AI or other areas yeah absolutely we are we are diving deep into AI now looking at predictive analytics for patient flow um trying to predict surges in the ER before they happen so we can staff appropriately um also looking at AI to help with uh inbox management for our primary care physicians which is another huge source of burnout um so really just trying to find all those friction points in the system and smooth them out with technology so that the human connection can really be the center of care again I love that from friction to flow that's a great great way to put it well Dr Smith thank you so much for sharing your experience it's really inspiring to see how technology can actually bring the humanity back into medicine thank you Cole it was a pleasure [Music]