Though technology is commonplace in hospitals and health systems today, many tasks continue to be done manually. Inefficient use of valuable resources has downstream effects on everything, from the availability of high-quality care at a single institution to the perception of healthcare as an industry where time-consuming and costly manual workflows are the norm. Adopting automation in healthcare can streamline clinical and administrative processes so employees in all roles are more productive, less likely to make mistakes and more engaged in their work.

What Is Healthcare Automation?

Business process automation in healthcare emphasizes using technology to reduce human intervention in a range of processes, from admin and supply chain management to clinical documentation and patient monitoring. Most use cases for healthcare automation happen behind the scenes, accomplishing tasks ranging from appointment scheduling and billing to data analysis and predictive modeling. Wherever automation is applied, the aim is straightforward: Free healthcare professionals from the burden of repetitive tasks so they can focus on clinical and operational excellence.

Key Takeaways

  • Automation relieves healthcare workers of repetitive tasks that range from answering phone calls to entering data.
  • Automation augments the in-person care experience as well as home-based remote monitoring and ongoing patient outreach.
  • On the backend, automation streamlines billing and data management and helps address security challenges, such as threat monitoring and account management.
  • Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will allow for predictive modeling and decision support that enables more personalized care.
  • Whether through expanded use of remote monitoring or more efficient administrative processes, automation helps healthcare organizations lower costs and increase access to care.

Healthcare Automation Explained

One of the healthcare industry’s many challenges is the need to manage multiple workflows simultaneously, including case management, care coordination, patient engagement, remote monitoring, data analysis, staffing, scheduling, billing, and budgeting. Managing these workflows manually is time-consuming, resource-intensive, and expensive. Automation can streamline these workflows, remove bottlenecks, and improve efficiency.

That’s why healthcare organizations are investing so much money in automation and are expected to continue doing so. Market researchers value the global healthcare automation market at nearly $38 billion in 2024 and project that it will approach $63 billion by the end of 2030, making for an 8.7% compound annual growth rate. AI capabilities account for the largest share of automation spending, though the research also points to momentum in remote monitoring, home health, and robotic surgery—all of which also can benefit from integrated AI automation capabilities.

How Can Healthcare Automation Help Patients?

Patients benefit from automation in healthcare in three ways. One is that relieving staff of the burden of repetitive manual tasks, whether administrative or clinical, gives them more time to spend with patients. Office staff spend less time answering phone calls, entering data, or sending faxes, while clinical staff spend less time writing notes in their electronic health record (EHR) systems. Patient satisfaction with the care experience increases when staff can be more attentive and feel less rushed.

Another benefit is better diagnosis and treatment. Advances in AI make it possible to automate the analysis of large data sets quickly, such as medical records and imaging test results, to identify potential anomalies. Clinical staff can then make more informed decisions about what condition a patient has and how that condition should be treated.

The third benefit is automation’s potential to streamline a patient’s engagements with the health system during and in between visits. Automated systems for scheduling appointments, sending and paying bills, filling out intake forms, uploading records, verifying insurance, refilling prescriptions, and requesting referrals mean patients don’t have to make as many phone calls or fill out as many forms. Both the care process and back-office administration become more streamlined—and patients are less likely to miss appointments or have an unmet care need.

How Can Healthcare Automation Help Health Systems?

Many of the benefits of automation for patients also help health systems. For example, staff who spend less time on paperwork, phone calls, data entry, and other manual workflows are better able to work to their full potential. Clinical staff can focus on patient care, while operational staff can focus on more strategic initiatives, such as supply chain optimization, budget forecasting, and data accessibility.

More broadly, automation can drive increased productivity and lower costs for virtually all aspects of a healthcare organization. A 2024 report from the American Hospital Association found that administrative costs account for an estimated 40% of the total expense that hospitals incur when providing patient care, and McKinsey & Company has estimated workers spend up to 30% of their day on administrative tasks or other non-care activities. Automating a range of financial, clinical, operational, and customer service workflows can improve efficiency on the front line of patient care and in the back office while reducing the time and cost associated with previously manual tasks.

12 Healthcare Automation Types and Applications

Automation can be applied to a wide range of workflows in healthcare. Caring for patients in the hospital and at home, managing clinical and financial data, and ensuring security and compliance are just some of the complex tasks that automation can help simplify. Here’s a look at 12 common types of automation in healthcare.

1. Automated Patient Intake and Onboarding

The traditional intake process requires patients to record demographic information, medical history, and insurance details on forms and hand them to office staff to type the information into an EHR or practice management system. This process is time-consuming, error-prone, and monotonous. Data extraction tools can ingest documents, recognize text, and map data to the correct fields in a software application, eliminating the need to manually enter data. Likewise, electronic intake forms that patients fill out themselves online can achieve similar goals in terms of reducing errors and increasing staff productivity.

Consider how much this type of automation would please a patient who, for example, checks in to see a specialist for the first time and finds all their medical information, insurance data, and payment preferences already loaded into the specialists’ administrative system. All the patient need do is confirm the information is correct.

2. Appointment Scheduling and Automated Reminders

Appointments are sometimes challenging to get on the calendar due to the potential for scheduling conflicts and the many requirements involved in finding the right provider for a patient. Automated scheduling systems are adept at following those matching requirements, and online scheduling reduces healthcare providers’ inbound phone calls. Here, integration with EHR and practice management systems is critical to ensure that the scheduling system and patients have up-to-date information about physician practices and availability.

Similarly, phone or paper reminders are helpful but inefficient. Patients can easily misplace a slip of paper or a card or ignore a voice mail message. Automated SMS or email reminders are more likely to be received. They are also more likely to be acted on, especially when they offer patients the opportunity to fill out the necessary forms in a patient portal before their appointment.

3. Electronic Health Records Management and Data Sharing

The EHR system has arguably become the lifeblood of clinical operations. The easier it is to share EHR data with disparate business units within an organization, as well as with other hospitals, labs, or payers, the easier it is for clinicians to make evidence-based diagnostic and treatment decisions. Integrating EHRs with enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other business applications extends the use of EHR data to financial, research, administrative, supply chain, and other operational teams as well.

4. Data Entry, Extraction, and Reporting Automation

The same data extraction technology that streamlines data entry for patient intake can be applied to paper-based patient records. This has become essential for closing gaps in records and providing healthcare organizations with more complete medical histories for all patients. Similarly, such natural language processing functionality, combined with generative AI, can analyze unstructured data and prepare reports that are beneficial for clinical uses, such as visit summaries or radiology analyses, as well as for auditing and compliance teams.

5. Automated Billing, Payments, Claims, and Insurance Processing

Nearly three in four health systems already use or are implementing some form of billing automation. It provides a big benefit: Deloitte estimates that such automation can free up nearly half of a revenue cycle professional’s time. Here, automation can cover frontend tasks, such as preauthorization for medical procedures and financial clearance, midcycle tasks, including coding and documentation, and backend functions, such as claims processing, payment integrity, and collections.

6. Cybersecurity Automation and Compliance Management

Automation makes the compliance reporting process more efficient, as teams spend less time gathering data and creating reports. Automated systems also lend themselves to greater compliance than manual processes, because IT teams can configure system usage and access rights that help to enforce compliance by preventing unauthorized access to sensitive information. In addition, cybersecurity tools are evolving to automatically scan networks and identify genuine threats, sorting them out from large numbers of “false positives,” which relieves IT security teams of a heavy burden. Some advanced security tools can even be configured to automatically mitigate the threats they identify, and that capability is expected to mature rapidly and become more widespread.

7. Diagnostic Support and Decision-Making Tools

Machines can’t replace the specialized expertise of physicians, but they can augment the decision-making process. AI tools can analyze medical images to detect abnormalities and recommend to physicians a diagnosis or treatment plan. In the lab, meanwhile, automated systems can perform tests and analyze findings quickly, cutting down on the time care teams—and patients—wait for results.

8. Remote Patient Monitoring and Care Support

Advances in smart watches and other wearable technology allow for continuous monitoring of patients, both in the hospital and at home. The latter is valuable for making care more accessible to those who may not be able to travel to a clinic. Critically, automation technology also examines the data that streams from a connected device, alerting care teams only when an intervention is necessary. That saves the time and effort of sorting through hefty data sets with normal vital signs to find the problematic ones.

9. Medication Management and Automated Dispensing

Robotic systems are dispensing medications within some hospital pharmacies and, in some advanced implementations, even delivering them to nursing stations or patient rooms. This means clinical staff spend less time running back and forth to find medications. Health systems can also send email or SMS reminders to patients outside the hospital, telling them that it’s time to refill their medications. This not only saves the time required for telephone follow-ups, but also improves patient adherence to the medicine regiment, which contributes directly to improved outcomes.

10. Automated Discharge Planning and Management

Discharge can be a stressful time. Care teams know patients want to get out the door and go home as quickly as possible, making it difficult for them to pay proper attention to discharge instructions. And, in the rush to send patients home, care teams may overlook critical information if manually preparing discharge summaries. Systems that automatically create electronic forms based on a patient’s records help to ensure that prescriptions, follow-up appointments, recovery instructions, and other key details are covered in the documents patients take home. And because these systems create documents quickly and automatically, discharge nurses can spend more time talking to patients and their loved ones to emphasize the most important information for post-stay care.

11. Document Classification and Organizational Tools

Unstructured documents proliferate in healthcare. There are clinical records that range from prescriptions to radiology reports to scanned copies of paper-based screening surveys. There are also administrative documents, such as driver’s licenses, insurance cards, and payment receipts. The ability to automatically scan, sort, classify, and organize medical documents by the type of file and the information they contain is more than just a time-saver. It also enables better use of data for analytics because documents have been structured and organized.

12. Automated Patient Surveys and Feedback Collection

Feedback is essential for making sure patients’ needs are met. Automating the process of sending surveys and reminders—whether they’re informal questionnaires or the mandated Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey—takes a tedious task off the to-do list for office staff and marketing teams.

Advantages of Adopting Healthcare Automation

Health systems that embrace business process automation can save time and money, standardize processes, and cut down on human errors. They’re also better positioned to track data and use it to drive decision-making, as information is digitized and accessible to leaders throughout the organization. Here are 15 of the most common advantages of automation in healthcare.

  • Enhanced efficiency and productivity: Automation improves productivity by streamlining and systematizing time-consuming tasks, particularly those associated with data entry.
  • Optimized scheduling processes: Modeling factors such as patient demand and hospital capacity helps organizations improve workforce management by scheduling staff members where and when they’re needed most.
  • Cost savings and financial efficiency: Healthcare organizations improve financial performance when workers are more productive and make fewer errors. In some cases, workers who had previously done tasks that have been automated can be reallocated to other work.
  • Improved data accuracy and management: Unstructured data that has been aggregated and scanned can be normalized into a consistent format. This makes the data easier to organize, integrate into patient records, and use for downstream analysis.
  • Streamlined data transfer and access: Enabling staff and applications to automatically and securely share data is faster—and far less frustrating—than traditional fax-based workflows.
  • Minimized errors: In an industry where workers have long shifts and must care for many patients at once, systematic and automated processes minimize human errors associated with stress and fatigue.
  • Strengthened security and compliance: Automatically monitoring devices, applications, and networks for security vulnerabilities helps organizations stay a step ahead of attackers, especially if security tools also automatically mitigate threats behind the scenes. And automated systems configured to adhere to relevant regulations can help enforce compliance.
  • Efficient management of patient billing: Automating numerous steps in the revenue cycle, such as entering codes, sending bills, obtaining preauthorizations, and appealing denials, expedites the billing process. That means payments come to the health system faster.
  • Reduction in staff burnout: Healthcare workers have high-stress jobs, but can be more productive and less stressed when tedious tasks are done for them. Automation can also help to reduce employee turnover, as workers are more satisfied with the higher-level work they’re now able to do.
  • Elevated patient engagement and satisfaction: Automation of clinical tasks, such as note-taking and order entry, helps care teams pay better attention to patients during appointments, while automated outreach in between visits keeps patients engaged in their care.
  • Higher quality of care: With fewer distractions from administrative tasks and greater insight from decision-support tools, care teams can focus on their patients’ care needs.
  • Increased accessibility to care: Automation that lowers costs and enables a health system to manage higher patient loads faster and more efficiently helps health systems serve more patients. Additionally, automated remote monitoring systems can extend accessibility to care to patients in their homes.
  • Enhanced patient privacy: Organizations can automatically limit workers’ information access to only the data and applications they need in their given role, which reduces the likelihood that sensitive information will fall into the wrong hands.
  • Improved patient relationships: When automation allows care teams to spend more time with patients during visits and send personalized messages between in-person visits, patients feel more valued and loyal to the organization. Patient satisfaction and care quality also improve when patients can ask non-urgent questions through portal messaging systems as they arise instead of waiting for their next appointment.
  • Support for critical medical functions: Automation can support clinical decision-making by providing care teams with data-driven evidence to create treatment plans or recommend the right medication. Meanwhile, robotic systems can support surgical procedures, medication dispensing, or laboratory operations, such as preparing and analyzing samples.

Addressing Healthcare Automation Challenges

There is no shortage of healthcare industry challenges. As health systems pursue automation, leaders should be mindful of three key challenges that could emerge: data privacy, the impact of technology on the workforce, and accountability. Thinking about their potential effects during the planning and rollout of automation can help to address workers’ and patients’ most common concerns.

  • Data privacy and security concerns: When manual processes are automated, more computer systems need access to sensitive clinical and financial data. Each one represents an access point to a health system’s network—and a vulnerability that a hacker can penetrate to obtain data. Organizations must choose third-party partners that comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and other privacy regulations. It’s also worth noting that automation is positioned to improve security, as automated systems can assign access rights to protected health information only to authorized users or identities.
  • Job displacement and workforce adaptation: Workers in many industries worry that automation will render them obsolete, and healthcare is no exception. For example, some fear that chatbots will replace customer service agents—or, more dramatically, that AI tools will make treatment decisions instead of doctors. In an industry where personal connections are vital, healthcare leaders should emphasize that automation will augment workers in their current roles and not replace the human touch they bring to their work. Making routine administrative tasks easier will give staff more time for the critical tasks of caring for patients or serving the organization.
  • Human oversight and accountability: AI technology is only as good as the data on which it was trained. Trained models may exhibit bias if, for example, training data didn’t include sufficient samples from certain populations. AI model providers typically take care to assess and correct biases as they discover them. To the extent possible, healthcare providers should seek transparency in AI model training datasets and be aware of and account for any known biases. Clinical staff should be informed of known biases and take them into consideration when assessing the validity and applicability of AI model findings and conclusions.

The Future of Healthcare Automation

To date, automation in healthcare has focused primarily on streamlining administrative tasks, which has helped health systems save time and allocate resources more efficiently. But broader adoption of automation is on the horizon and is expected to provide greater support for data-driven decision-making, highly personalized care recommendations, and increased access to much-needed clinical services in the hospital and at home. Here are some examples of what lies ahead for healthcare automation.

1. Artificial Intelligence

As AI evolves, it’s poised to advance automation across healthcare. Advanced AI algorithms could help identify patients with a high risk of developing a disease and recommend personalized interventions. Virtual assistants could answer patients’ basic clinical or administrative queries without the need for human intervention. On the back end, AI capabilities are expected to make big improvements in predictive analytics that help health systems better allocate budget and resources in ways that improve care—and care efficiency—in specific regions and/or for specific populations.

2. Predictive Analytics

The ability to more accurately predict risk would enable healthcare organizations to transition away from a reactive approach to care delivery, budgeting, or business planning. Predicting risk in individual patients or subsets of a patient population would allow for measures such as lifestyle changes or screenings that could prevent the onset of a complex chronic condition and the need for ongoing care. When health system leaders are able to model multiple factors—from the onset of the flu season to the likelihood of an adverse event in the intensive care unit—they could better allocate physical resources and personnel to the locations where they’re most likely to be needed.

3. Personalized Medicine

Automation is expected to drive personalized communication with patients. That’s not just appointment or prescription refill reminders but also high-value engagements. Personalization plays an important part in patient care, as the ability to analyze detailed patient records can help care teams make targeted recommendations for treatment. And recommendations can be even more personalized—and, therefore, more effective—when health systems have expanded the amount of data available to predictive models by automatically scanning and classifying unstructured data sources. Upcoming birthdays, for example, could trigger alerts to remind patients about preventive screenings, such as colonoscopies, that are covered by their insurance. Such alerts could include links to schedule an appointment.

4. Remote Patient Monitoring

Remote monitoring has much to gain from automation. Sensors that continuously monitor a patient’s vital signs, detect abnormalities, and alert care teams that an intervention may be necessary could help to ensure that patients get the care they need, when they need it, without forcing clinical teams to manually monitor sensor output. Additionally, remote monitoring systems could connect with smart home technology to monitor environmental factors that may affect patient health and automatically make adjustments.

5. Telehealth

Automation has the potential to make telehealth more widely available to patients. For example, using automation technology, clinicians could conduct pre- and post-surgery visits remotely, saving patients the time, hassle, and potential physical pain of coming into the clinic for an interview and screening. Or remote monitoring applications that continuously assess patient data could recommend a telehealth visit if they detect something is amiss. Within the hospital, the option to automatically open a tele-consult with another provider could save care teams precious time when they need to discuss test results or obtain a second opinion.

6. Robotics

Physical robots are common for minimally invasive surgery, as they have a greater range of motion, make smaller incisions, and aren’t subject to some causes of human error, such as fatigue or tremors. AI and automation are expected to further augment robotics in surgery by providing real-time diagnostic and decision support. Robots could also play a greater role in dispensing medications within the hospital pharmacy and delivering them to the right nursing station or patient room, reducing the likelihood of human error and fulfilling prescriptions faster.

Achieve More with Healthcare Automation

Because automation can touch all parts of a health system, organizations benefit from an automation strategy that embraces needs across the business. NetSuite’s cloud-based healthcare and life sciences ERP provides healthcare companies with a business management suite capable of supporting process automation, real-time reporting, automated patient outreach, and more. With NetSuite, health systems can pursue automation initiatives that are configurable to their unique needs, scalable across their lines of business, and attested to comply with HIPAA and other government regulations.

Today’s hospitals and health systems face continued pressure to cut costs and improve efficiency. Automation can play a pivotal role in process improvement, enabling organizations to increase productivity without compromising quality of care or disrupting the valuable relationships they’ve built with patients. Done right, automation will augment the work that employees already do, from the front lines of patient care to the back office, and make critical workflows for accessing, sharing, and managing data more secure than when they’re done manually. This enables healthcare organizations to better meet the needs of patients and employees and prepare for the challenges that lie ahead.

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Healthcare Automation FAQs

What are the risks of automation in healthcare?

Automation has the potential to make healthcare seem less personal. Many tasks that used to require human conversation, such as refilling a prescription or scheduling an appointment, could be done using automated systems and interactions. In addition, algorithms that predict a patient’s risk of developing a condition or recommend certain care interventions may make care teams feel that their role in patient care has been diminished.

What does RPA mean in healthcare?

Robotic process automation (RPA) happens when software applications automate repetitive manual tasks that have several steps. One example is appointment scheduling, where steps include setting up an appointment, confirming the physician is available, sending a patient a reminder, and prompting a patient to fill out intake forms in advance. RPA completes each task in the process that would otherwise require a human. Though often confused with artificial intelligence, RPA software is generally far simpler and doesn’t require AI capabilities.

How does automation affect the quality of care?

Care teams that spend less time on manual data entry during a clinical appointment can spend more time listening to a patient and understanding their needs. Data-driven clinical decision-support systems can help clinical staff make better recommendations for treatment options. And in the operating room, robots that assist surgeons don’t experience fatigue and aren’t subject to tremors, making them valuable assets when precise incisions are needed.

What is an example of automation in the medical field?

A common example of automation in the medical field is managing the revenue cycle. Automation makes it possible to generate billing codes based on the information in a medical record, submit a claim to an insurance company, send a bill to a patient, and process payments from patients as well as insurers. Additionally, automation can be applied to tasks such as requesting prior authorization or appealing claims denied due to minor errors, allowing finance teams to reserve their personal attention for the most complex billing scenarios.

Will healthcare be automated?

Healthcare is unlikely to be fully automated. While many administrative and clinical tasks can be automated, there are benefits to having humans review these automated processes. For example, physicians can ensure that the recommendation of a clinical decision-support system will actually meet a patient’s needs, or finance staff can check that the information is correct in a high-dollar claim that’s about to be sent to an insurer. Full process automation will likely be reserved for processes where the impact on clinical care or revenue is minimal.