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Hospitals are complex entities to manage and have traditionally been very inefficient. After the pandemic’s impact on their financial resources and human capital, efficiency has come into the limelight. Supporting the strained staff (reeling under shortages and burnouts), as well as hospital processes with automation solutions is key to help build greater efficiency, and therefore improve operating margins.

While hospitals have clinical, operational and financial efficiency needs – the financial side is being served with several automation solutions for quite some time now. Clinical efficiency solutions are complex, in requiring regulatory approvals and clinical acceptance for adoption. Operational efficiency solutions are therefore an opportune area – not just for health IT vendors and startups, but even medtech vendors. Not only are medtech vendors looking into operational aspects of patient flow and capacity management (enterprise-wide, or department-specific), they are also able to streamline workflows for their existing device solutions, to reduce the non-clinical workload on hospital staff. In the broader operational efficiency space, the four major areas of improvement today are, workforce management and support, patient flow and capacity management, resources scheduling and utilization optimization, and inventory management. But this opportunity scape continues to evolve, offering broader opportunities for every healthcare stakeholder to be aware of.