Posted on April 13, 2023

How to Improve Time-Efficiency in Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Settings

In today’s economical climate, it is more important than ever to maximise time-efficiency to ensure you can meet the needs of as many patients as possible. Fortunately, there have been several solutions developed to aid you in this task, from removing administration burdens to efficient data collecting. These time-efficiency solutions will benefit both provider and patient, and can be implemented smoothly to enhance your pharmaceutical or healthcare operation.

Electronic Health Records

Moving to an Electronic Health Record (also known as EHR) system can do wonders for improving your time-efficiency. EHR systems offer several unique advantages compared to traditional patient data storage systems, and are indispensable when dealing with a large number of patients. An EHR contains all the details of a patient’s medical history, as well as any treatments plans and test results. A provider can use these to immediately receive a high-level overview of key information before an appointment, so you can immediately get up to speed with your patient’s concerns.

Providers can also use EHRs to offer direct help to patients. With a dedicated digital health app, patients can access their EHRs to quickly view test results, and these apps can use the data from an EHR to provide the patient with specialised care advice. An EHR can also be quickly transferred between clinics, reduce administration burdens when taking on a new patient. In a pharmaceutical setting, they can be used to keep a dedicated record of a patients prescription history, as well as the details of requested prescriptions. Pharmacists can access this and more from an EHR without having the interrogate a patient on their history, and quickly and easily make informed prescription decisions.

Automated Solutions

We are living in the age of rapidly expanding AI capabilities, and there has never been a better time to incorporate it into your healthcare systems. AI solutions can be used to aid with the administration of your operation, allowing you to focus on helping your patients. This will also directly benefit your patients, giving them 24/7 support from artificial intelligence apps.

Primarily, AI can be quickly integrated to assist with day-to-day administration, particularly patient facing. Using automated chatbots can be extremely helpful for aiding patients with their prescriptions, such as with issuing refill reminders, or answering simple questions around common side-effects. The burdens of scheduling can also be relieved with AI. Patients can submit appointment requests through an automated portal, and an artificial intelligence system will assign a timeslot that best suits them at their earliest convenience.

Whilst the above patient-focused automations removes the responsibilities of certain duties from the healthcare provider, there are also several automations that a provider can directly interface with. Billing is incredibly time consuming for a provider to organise, but automated solutions can be used to handle insurance claims, as well as collect billing information from the patient. AI is an incredibly versatile technology, and these are just some of the ways your practise can use it to increase the efficiency of your work schedules.