Automation, AI create $350M in savings opportunities for hospital network
300+
Automation and AI process improvement opportunities identified across clinical functions
$350M
Potential cost savings identified through automation and AI opportunities
30%+
Potential time savings automation could create for mobile radiology units
At a glance
Client
A multinational hospital network
Industry
Healthcare
Our role
Identify automation opportunities
Our solution
Automation roadmap clinical savings
Cost savings benefit patients and clinicians
Scenario
A major hospital network wanted to reduce costs and expand clinical capacity so practitioners could spend more time on patient care.
Approach
Grant Thornton and Auxis shadowed clinical teams on site, mapped workflows and quantified automation opportunities across key functions.
Result
The team identified 300+ automation and AI opportunities. Twenty-seven were mapped and quantified to demonstrate $350 million in potential savings across the network.
Scenario
Creating more time for care
A multinational hospital network saw an opportunity to give clinical teams more time for patient care while improving productivity across facilities. Operating at significant scale, with a strong focus on quality, learning and continuous improvement, its leaders wanted a practical view of where automation and AI could make the biggest measurable difference across clinical operations.
The challenges this healthcare provider faced are familiar to employees and leaders alike across the industry. Medical professionals are deeply devoted to patient care, yet they spend significant time on administrative work that can pull focus from patients.
The network asked Grant Thornton and Auxis, a Grant Thornton US company, to explore high-value areas including nursing, labs, radiology and pharmacy. The goal was to identify opportunities that could improve service quality, reduce manual work and create cost savings while maintaining a constant focus on the organization’s core purpose: delivering better patient care.
Approach
Clinical knowledge meets automation insight
A mobile radiology team’s manual tasks illustrate a broader challenge healthcare workers face everywhere. Grant Thornton and Auxis shadowed these professionals and found that for each image the team took, an employee needed to manually log details, copy information and enter patient identifiers.
The engagement team found that automating that manual work would free up more than 30% of each team’s time. That would enable them to visit three patient rooms per hour instead of two. Across many radiology teams and hospitals, those time savings could result in better customer service and meaningful cost savings.
The Grant Thornton and Auxis team that came together for this engagement illustrated the strength and capabilities of the growing firm. A specialized Grant Thornton Ireland team of consultants who once worked in the healthcare industry traveled to the United States to join forces with Grant Thornton U.S. teammates and Auxis leaders with deep healthcare operations knowledge.
The Ireland team was made up of former nurses, healthcare practitioners and pharmacists. They could speak the language of hospital staff, ask precise questions about how work actually happened, and separate genuine opportunities from noise as they shadowed employees throughout hospitals in the network. That clinical credibility opened doors on the wards, enabling front line teams to talk with Grant Thornton as peers.
Rather than relying on conference-room interviews, the team visited numerous hospitals and followed practitioners as they performed daily work. Grant Thornton and Auxis documented current-state workflows, captured the time spent on activities, estimated the size of each opportunity and modeled potential savings across most of the network.
Result
Savings free up time for patient care
The approach helped surface hundreds of potential practical improvements across clinical workflows, including:
- Radiology logging
- Consent form digitization
- Smarter pharmacy compliance checks
The original objective was to identify at least $20 million in savings opportunity. Grant Thornton’s analysis ultimately identified more than 300 opportunities and approximately $350 million in potential savings, far exceeding the initial target.
The impact extended beyond a financial business case. By targeting repetitive, manual work in clinical settings, the roadmap gave the hospital network a clearer path to improving capacity and productivity while allowing practitioners to focus more of their time on patient care.
A potential for genuine improvements was documented in the following areas:
- Compliance and risk management: A move to capture patient consent digitally at the bedside can remove a compliance gap and reduce manual administration. Previously, patient consent was captured on paper by hand, and then scanned into the record after the patient had already gone home. This created a compliance gap, prevented a real-time audit trail, delayed recordkeeping and increased risks. Digital consent was the biggest cost saver that Grant Thornton identified.
- Patient safety: Automating the escalation of monitoring alerts such as SPOT alerts for early signs of sepsis can help flag patient health deterioration and enable intervention earlier compared with relying on manual checks and handoffs. Reducing the manual actions also can enable the clinical staff to focus more on caring for critically ill patients. In a condition where every hour matters, faster care can save lives as well as money.
- Staff efficiency: Automating care providers’ signature requirement for the upload of EKG results to patient charts ended a frustrating chase for manual signatures. Timing is critical with EKGs, but nurses often spent hours chasing doctors for signatures enabling EKGs to be added to patients’ charts. The digital signature process ends the chase, speeds up diagnosis and puts nurses back at patients’ bedsides.
Connect with our team
Partner, Digital Transformation
Grant Thornton | Auxis Business Modernization & Outsourcing Services
Partner, AI & Transformation
Grant Thornton Advisors LLC
Vlad Anichkin is a Partner in Grant Thornton’s Advisory business, helping organizations harness the power of AI and digital transformation to achieve measurable growth, efficiency, and innovation.
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