Author’s note: This article is my attempt to share our team at Cortico’s experiences and outcomes with healthcare workflow automations, based on deployments for thousands of healthcare providers. I hope this information can help provide insights about the impact of clinical automation we’ve experienced in order to help inform practices during their digital transformation efforts. The specific clinical case studies listed below are real clinics whose identity is restricted for privacy reasons. We have their permission to offer reference calls upon request, to individual interested parties. If you wish to speak to them, just contact us!
Background: Where Did Healthcare Workflow Automation Come From?
Clinic owners and doctors often grapple with a common challenge: the substantial impact of healthcare admin costs. This administrative load can create friction, affecting efficiency, the quality of patient care, and ultimately, practice growth.
Historically, clinics have sought various solutions to address these challenges.
Approaches like remote medical assistants have been explored, though these can sometimes introduce complexities related to privacy, security, and patient safety.
While “digital transformation” is a widely discussed concept in healthcare, real-world medical office efficiency gains and actual reductions in healthcare costs haven’t often materialized as expected. Prior generation patient engagement platforms often focus on delivering features, while failing to obtain a provider-to-staff ration better than 1-1.
However, the landscape is evolving.
The above challenges have led to a trend toward value based technology that is accountable for a measurable business impact and guarantees a real world ROI, instead of simply technology for its’ own sake.
Definition: Healthcare Workflow Automation: Technology that is accountable to, and evaluated on, real world business outcomes that result from its implementation of clinical workflows.
Value Based Technology, Deep Integrations, and AI Agents
Cortico is part of a new generation of tools which are quantitatively different, in that they surpass old systems and obtain a favourable provider-to-staff ratio, often reaching as high as 4-1 and beyond. Fundamentally, to reduce human effort in medicine, Cortico’s healthcare automation solutions acts as a digital medical assistant designed to demonstrate measurable workflow efficiency improvements. A variety of factors combine to achieve this.
- Deeper integration with the EMR using technology such as APIs, robotic process automation, browser extensions, as well as contextual and Smart on FHIR launch.
- The advent of AI agents to manage nuanced aspects of workflows challenging for traditional software.
- Market pressures: Cortico’s rapid growth has been as a result of our ability to deliver real financial impact which meets the market demand created by shortfalls of prior generation systems.
This enables our platform to function as a virtual medical assistant for doctors, helping to significantly reduce many human administrative tasks.
Cortico’s clinical AI/platform implements healthcare process automation within clinics, and we’ve observed the following outcomes:
- Clinic 1: 14 doctors supported by 2 admin staff. 100% growth in 6 months. “Cortico’s software is a game-changer for our telehealth practice. It streamlines daily operations, effortlessly managing over 200 daily bookings with reliable automation. This allows us to prioritize patient care.”
- Clinic 2: 12 doctors with 2 admin staff. 200% growth in 12 months. Quote: “Cortico reduces admin work for MD4ME helping us avoid hiring more staff! Thank you Cortico”
- Clinic 3: 22 doctors operating efficiently with 6 admin staff. 80% in 18 months. Quote: “A lot of other clinics are closing down due to overhead costs, while we’re growing thanks to Cortico.”
- Clinic 4: 18-29 admin hours saved per week. $20-$25k/yr recovered. 200+ MD Hours gained. Quote: “As a busy physician, Cortico has been a game changer - streamlining admin tasks so I can focus on what matters most: my patients”
Staff Empowerment with Healthcare Automation
Our five years of dedicated research and development have shown that up to 84% of medical admin work can be automated. The tasks often automated are those frequently cited as most burdensome – repetitive data entry and extensive phone duties, which collectively account for a significant portion of administrative effort.
It’s notable that even with these efficiency gains, a reduction in staff headcount isn’t a common or primary outcome. Instead, we frequently observe practices experiencing accelerated growth after adopting Cortico. Existing staff are often re-allocated to higher-value “physician assist” tasks, which in turn can improve provider capacity and output by approximately 15%. This is obtained primarily by reducing no-shows and automation of several clinician admin tasks such as followups, delivering documents to patients, or automating the work of delegating tasks to staff (which itself can be time consuming)
This dynamic allows a given size of administrative staff to support a considerably larger number of providers. It also enables team members to focus on more engaging work, while simultaneously enhancing output per provider. Collectively, this impact can significantly improve a practice’s competitiveness, helping clinics that might have previously faced financial viability challenges evolve into thriving, efficient businesses with promising opportunities for their owners.
Downsides and Pitfalls of Healthcare Workflow Automation
- Job Market Impacts While a direct reduction in headcount isn’t always a direct outcome of implementing practice automations, it does reduce future hiring needs dramatically and ultimately depends on how the clinical management team decides to allocate the new-found capacity. Medical practice automation does reduce the total number of medical admin jobs. While we regret the inevitable loss in jobs, the nature of healthcare is such that practices are currently understaffed, resulting in reduced ability to provide care for patients. Given the choice, the latter is a greater priority to our team and our clients, than the former.
- Marginalization of Traditional Clinics Many practices have not yet implemented medical practice automation, and risk losing financial viability compared to their more automated peers. For clinicians late in their career, the idea of automation can be intimidating and is not always readily embraced, marginalizing their ability to conduct business in the new and more automated landscape.
Does Practice Automation work for Elderly Patients?
Yes! Contrary to what intuition may suggest, we made the following observations.
- Elderly patients often have caregivers who save time using Cortico, so the access to care is improved.
- Many elderly patients successfully use the platform on a regular basis. Tactics like avoiding the need to install an app (using web based experiences requiring fewer clicks) have made the technology very accessible across generations.
- Finally, staff are free to focus on vulnerable, elderly or other patients who need extra care since 90% or more of the other patients prefer to interact digitally.
Return on Investment of Healthcare Workflow Automation
Return on investment is calculated as follows.
- First, calculate the increased profit based on a 15% output increase from providers and an admin cost reduction of 50% to 84%, depending on the automations chosen.
- Next, calculate the new costs of the platform. This amounts to $82 to $199 per full time provider. It’s good to factor in at least 1 hour per month of manager time to administer the platform, at least in the first quarter.
The resulting ROI should be in the 800% range. The next step is to test the solution and verify the associated ROI is obtained. Cortico offers a 90 day money back guarantee, on the above outcomes. While exact results vary, if Cortico fails to obtain an acceptable ROI, all fees from this 90 day period are refunded. A monthly business review and realtime dashboard are provided to monitor the ROI, such as identifying the number of appointments booked in Cortico. Adoption rates by patients are typically in the high double digits.
Conclusion
We hope this article from our lens as a Medical Workflow Automation vendor has provided some value. We would love to hear from you, drop us a line!
