You don't have to look hard to find examples of how AI is used in healthcare; from diagnostics to robotic treatment, and more. But what about using AI to tackle the time-consuming tasks that get in the way of managing your everyday medical practice workflow efficiently? Even in a small medical office, AI and robotics can improve the experience of both patients and staff in important ways. If you have the right AI tools you can make the most of your time, encourage teamwork, improve customer care and boost profits. So let's look at some of the ways AI is used in healthcare and how it is already helping small and medium-sized medical practices run their businesses better.
1. Investing in Your Workforce
Investing in your workforce is one of the best ways to future-proof your business against AI. While AI has the potential to automate many tasks and reduce the need for human workers, it's unlikely to replace human workers entirely. Instead, AI will likely augment human work by handling routine tasks and freeing human workers to focus on more complex tasks requiring human skills such as creativity, problem-solving, and emotional intelligence. To prepare your workforce for the future, you need to invest in training and upskilling programs that help your healthcare employees develop the skills that will be in demand in the AI-driven future. This could include data analysis, programming, and critical thinking skills. You should also create a continuous learning and development culture to ensure your employees continuously adapt to new technologies and changing needs of your practice.
2. Build a Strong Data Strategy
AI is only as good as the data it's trained on, which means that having a strong data strategy is essential for future-proofing your business. To build a strong data strategy, you must ensure that your data is accurate, complete, and relevant. You should also invest in data management tools and systems that help you store, analyse, and use your data effectively. It should also be able to successfully integrate with the relevant healthcare systems. Another critical aspect of building a strong data strategy is ensuring your data is secure and protected from cyber threats. Especially since patient records are highly confidential. As AI becomes more prevalent, the risks of cyber threats will only increase, which means that investing in cybersecurity measures is essential for protecting your medical practice.
3. Client records and informatics
AI in health informatics is a smart way to look at huge amounts of billing and coding data across multiple patient visits to identify trends. This can be enormously helpful in identifying possible side effects and contraindications, understanding the overall health of your patient base, and more. These systems are engineered to handle the flow of patients through the healthcare system while keeping clinical quality, patient safety, and patient experience high. All this also helps you individualise your patient care and gives insights to the professionals working in your practice. Which ultimately leads to more positive patient experience and favourable reviews.
4. Scribes and medical assistants
Clinicians are tired. Why? The main reason for this is there is a mismatch between the caring carers and the complicated, overcrowded healthcare system where they work. Coming to their rescue is the AI medical scribe which is greatly assisting clinicians. AI medical scribes make it easier to keep track of paperwork, so doctors can spend more time talking to patients and less time on paperwork. Here robotics and automation do the tedious work of keeping up with regulations, patient standards, and competition and simply alerting the healthcare professionals of any troubleshooting and red flags.
5. Marketing and reputation management
Even though you work in person, your online image is still very important. AI can help you stay in touch with your current patients through chatbots, email marketing, and automated posts on social media. Using AI systems also makes it easy for offices to get reviews from patients. Someone in your office used to have to put in a lot of extra work to do these tedious things and you in turn would have to pay them for that. But now AI is taking care of all that. Automating medical marketing gets rid of the need to do multiple things at once, which can hurt output.
6. Human Resources and management
HR automation software is a set of tools that help small businesses do things like devise workflows, plan leave, assign locums, assess budgets, get out payroll and track medical aid requirements. It also improves how HR helps management by maximising productivity while balancing morale, patient satisfaction, revenue, compliance, and other clinical goals. The best programme for managing a medical practice has both AI and automation features. This cuts down on work in non-clinical areas, which makes it easier for the clinician to get on with their core focus.
7. Managing your schedule and appointments
One of the most useful ways AI helps medical businesses handle their healthcare practices is through basic organisation. Medical scheduling technology pretty much wrote the book on how to make a medical office run more smoothly like scheduling appointments, managing the patient paperwork, and sending out appointment reminders. Scheduling analytics also streamlines visits by making it easier to plan appointments, keeping you on track, reducing the amount of time patients have to wait, and making the most of the practice’s busy schedule.
The bottom line
AI and automation streamline communication, making it easier for doctors and patients to talk to each other and greatly assist medical practitioners serve their communities. Even small clinics use AI to schedule, keep track of inventory, track sales, handle relationships, and more. While this might sound like a perk that only big medical businesses can offer, in fact, more and more practices are using AI to improve their electronic health records. This is a big deal for managing processes in healthcare, especially in a small private practice with fewer resources. So it may well be time to consider a cash advance to fund this worthwhile upgrade of your medical practice. Contact Merchant Capital and fund your practice in the next 48 hours.