How Does AI Reduce Costs in Healthcare?

Fortunately, we are also experiencing rapid technological development. The tools needed to streamline work and minimize the human effort required to run your facility smoothly improve daily. AI toolkits, in particular, offer efficient and reliable solutions to the budget efficiency challenges that CFOs often face.

Let's explore five ways that AI tools can reduce healthcare costs, focusing on realistic and actionable use cases available now.

Why Focus on Low-Risk Applications?

The best way to introduce AI into your workflow is through low risk applications. While AI can offer potential benefits in clinical care, focusing on back-office efficiency and clinical applications where physicians have the final say is the safest route to healthcare cost reduction.

For this reason, the challenges of implementing new clinical procedures mean that back-office solutions are usually more practical than clinical solutions. Concerns regarding compliance, risk, and safety make it easier to prove the efficacy of back-office use cases, creating an optimal starting point for using AI in your healthcare organization.

Key AI Applications That Reduce Costs

AI excels at optimizing, automating, and streamlining routine tasks. Back-office routines that often consume hours of human time can be easily delegated to AI tools. AI's ability to quickly interface with data and digital documents – and its intuitive ability to adapt to variation – make it ideal for enhancing healthcare back-office productivity. Each of these five applications offers excellent potential for reducing costs and increasing efficiency for your healthcare facility.

1. Alleviating Administrative Burden

Administrative tasks are abundant in the healthcare business. One must keep schedules, track everything, manage approvals, and work with insurance for every service provided.

Automating eligibility verification can help confirm insurance benefits quickly for each patient. Connecting AI to data sources can also prevent errors and reduce denials in claim submissions.

In addition, AI-driven staff scheduling solutions can provide an adaptive way to manage absences and fluctuating staffing needs in healthcare facilities.

2. Optimizing Revenue Cycle Management

AI is also adept at handling financial matters related to your healthcare facility's revenue cycle. AI tools can quickly identify invoice match exceptions, reducing the risk of overpayments and improving your overall vendor relationships. After all, vendors appreciate precision and coordinated data as much as you do.

AI can create personalized payment plans to help patients afford the care they need. Offering plans can increase on-time payments, as patients are more willing to make incremental payments tailored to their financial situations.

3. Fixing Supply Chains

Your facility’s supply patterns aren’t random. They’re filled with insights waiting to be unlocked. With AI-driven data analysis, you can predict demand with precision and dodge the pitfalls of overstocking or running out of supplies. From seasonal trends to sudden surges, AI can have it covered.

AI can then analyze your inventory and help reduce waste by ensuring that older inventory is used first. This will prevent expirations by directing the staff to use the oldest supplies first while they are still usable. It will also optimize resource availability so everything is fully stocked when needed.

4. Enhancing Clinical Decision-Making

Hospitals are hesitant to incorporate AI into clinical workflows, and with good reason. While it’s not safe to let AI handle final clinical judgments alone, it can be a powerful tool to support healthcare professionals. By pulling together complete patient profiles with health histories, demographics, and even social determinants of health, AI helps providers make smarter, more informed decisions.

Patient triage, for example, takes a list of patients with specific symptoms and sorts them by potential urgency. AI can suggest routine care plans for common conditions like strep throat or the flu. AI can also detect potential diseases based on symptom clusters, identifying patterns often associated with a specific diagnosis.

Through these applications, AI can help reduce unnecessary tests or hospital stays while optimizing treatment for patients who need it.

5. Improving the Patient Experience

AI-powered tools are reshaping the patient experience, and we’re here for it. Imagine this: a conversational AI that greets patients online, through an app, or even at your facility’s kiosk. It simplifies appointment scheduling with an intuitive chat, handles automated prescription refills, and even offers location assistance. All those routine tasks? Covered. Patients get the smooth, friendly support they want. Meanwhile, your admin team gets time back to focus on the big-picture stuff.

Challenges to Address with AI Integration

AI has a lot of potential to reduce healthcare costs, mainly when used for back-office applications. Of course, like any toolkit, there are a few practical limitations and potential risks to consider.

The Initial Cost

Investing in AI tools and the necessary infrastructure to run them.

• Initial costs may involve purchasing the tools, hardware, and tech services to install your AI toolkits.
• Choosing the right bundle of AI tools can streamline the initial cost and simplify installation.

Integration Hurdles

Connecting your AI services with your other software and data sources

• Integration requires professional services to ensure AIs can interface with the systems they are designed to improve.
• Choosing AI tools designed to integrate with your healthcare software stack will streamline the integration process.

Data Privacy

Ensuring AI operations maintain HIPAA compliance.

• According to HIPAA regulations, AI solutions and healthcare back-office applications must always maintain patient data privacy.
• Any vendor with access to PHI must have a business associate agreement (BAA).

Explore AI Upgrades for Your Hospital

Every healthcare facility CFO can find at least a few ways for AI to help reduce operational costs. Now is the perfect time to explore specific AI tools and solutions to streamline your back-office functions. You can take back valuable time for your admins, keep your patients happy, and reduce sources of lost revenue across the board, from paperwork to inventory management to online patient services.