Automation Revolutionizing Clinical Decision Support (CDS) at Geisinger

By Phebe Strzempek, Director Automation, Geisinger

In the dynamic landscape of healthcare, Geisinger’s Steele Institute for Health Innovation is pioneering initiatives that harness automation to reshape patient care and streamline clinical workflows. Through cutting-edge technology and innovative approaches, Geisinger is ushering in an era of efficiency and excellence.

A pioneering initiative at Geisinger involves automating compliance audits for patient charts, targeting critical areas. This initiative aimed to revolutionize auditing, ensuring timely completion while upholding stringent quality standards. Digital algorithms are assigned to navigate electronic health records (EHRs) almost in real-time to identify patients under specific conditions, such as those requiring non-violent restraints or those on suicide watch. These algorithms then check for necessary orders and flowsheet completions per policy requirements to determine compliance.

Automations streamline the review of admitted patients, identifying and addressing missing information, and ensuring it’s promptly accessible online as needed by policy. This enables real-time access for nursing leadership. Additionally, compliance dashboards offer valuable insights into audit compliance rates across various units, hospitals, and regions, empowering nurse leaders to support documentation compliance within the EHR, thus enhancing patient safety. It’s crucial to emphasize the importance of documentation and our partnership with native systems, which helps us give time back to clinicians by managing tasks efficiently. This avoids inconsistencies and leads to quicker turnaround times for audit requirements and a better understanding of compliance rates.

Geisinger’s automation journey represents a paradigm shift in CDS. By harnessing the power of technology, they have revolutionized internal processes and set a new standard for excellence in patient care.

Through meticulous automation driven by Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technology, Geisinger ensures that individual chart audits are completed close to real-time, enabling the organization to achieve a nearly 100% completion rate in quality audits. This achievement represents a significant milestone in Geisinger’s journey toward excellence in patient care. The RPA technology employed by Geisinger plays a pivotal role in eliminating delays and errors inherent in human manual processes.

By creating a standardized method for completing each chart audit for all patients in all hospitals at Geisinger, the organization ensures consistency and adherence to the same high-quality standards across the board. This standardization enhances efficiency and facilitates seamless auditing processes, further contributing to the organization’s ability to achieve real-time completion of chart audits.

Leveraging cutting-edge technology to extract and analyze data from electronic medical records (EMRs), Geisinger maximizes the effectiveness of its automation initiatives. By automating routine tasks and streamlining workflows, Geisinger enables nursing managers and leaders to focus their time and expertise on initiatives to improve patient outcomes.

With RPA technology leading the way, Geisinger empowers its nursing managers and leaders to focus on driving positive change and innovation in patient care delivery, maximizing their potential. This strategic approach boosts operational efficiency and underscores Geisinger’s dedication to providing the highest quality of care to every patient.

Geisinger’s automation initiatives have far-reaching effects, yielding concrete improvements in patient safety, nursing compliance, and job satisfaction. By automating routine tasks, nurses and nurse managers gain valuable time to dedicate to direct patient care, elevating the standard of healthcare delivery. Geisinger places a premium on the well-being of its nursing and clinical staff, understanding that relieving them of mundane duties can significantly enhance job satisfaction and promote a healthier work-life balance. Through proactive efforts to streamline workflows and automate administrative processes, Geisinger reaffirms its commitment to fostering the professional growth and overall well-being of its healthcare professionals.

Geisinger’s proactive approach to addressing compliance challenges sets a precedent for other healthcare organizations and serves as a model for best practices in the industry. By leveraging automation to ensure adherence to regulatory standards, Geisinger enhances operational efficiency while promoting transparency and accountability across the organization. Geisinger’s commitment to utilizing cutting-edge technology to streamline processes benefits its operations and contributes to raising the standard of care and compliance across the healthcare sector.

Geisinger’s automation journey represents a paradigm shift in CDS. By harnessing the power of technology, they have revolutionized internal processes and set a new standard for excellence in patient care. As healthcare organizations worldwide embrace automation, Geisinger’s experience is a guiding light, illuminating the path toward a future where automation and innovation converge to create a healthier world for all.

Intelligent Automation Hub: Enhancing Efficiency and Patient Care

At Geisinger Health System, the Intelligent Automation Hub stands as a transformative force, revolutionizing internal processes to drive efficiency and, ultimately, elevate patient care. Collaborating closely with internal teams, the Automation Hub pioneers automated solutions for various processes and tasks, significantly enhancing operational efficiency. By enabling clinicians and care team members to concentrate on delivering high-quality patient care, we drive efficiencies and give valuable time back to the clinical staff, alleviating them from unnecessary tasks and fostering a more effective healthcare environment.

The Automation Hub comprises a dedicated team of business analysts and programmers who partner with data scientists to integrate various levels of technology. This collaborative effort enables the research and implementation of leading-edge automation tools throughout the organization.

To support its mission, the Automation Hub focuses on delivering business processes with tangible benefits, continuously improving the automation development process, and creating a robust platform for process automation. The goal is to add layers of intelligence to processes through enhanced automation, freeing up employees to engage in higher-value work.

The bot creation process spans six stages, from discovery to production, ensuring seamless integration and efficiency. Geisinger’s automation initiatives have yielded remarkable outcomes, notably emphasizing time savings and efficiency enhancements. For instance, the implementation of chart audit automation has resulted in approximately $6.5 million in cost avoidance measures and a staggering 100K hours saved, with a total transaction count of 300K. This underscores the avoidance of inconsistencies and translates into a swift turnaround for audit requirements and a deeper understanding of compliance rates.

In summary, Geisinger’s Intelligent Automation Hub represents a beacon of innovation in healthcare. By harnessing the power of automation, Geisinger continues to drive efficiency, improve patient care, and set new standards of excellence in the industry. As healthcare organizations worldwide embrace automation, Geisinger’s journey serves as a testament to the transformative potential of technology in shaping the future of healthcare delivery.