Easing Regulation Through Workflow and Automation by Amitech

This video shares an in production use case of an automation with well designed workflow, that overcomes many of the challenges faced by back-office operations in health care. The automation was carried out by St. Peter’s University Hospital, a teaching hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey, with technology and collaboration from Amitech.

Meghan Mehlberg, Vice President of Delivery at Amitech, and Michele Goodman, Practice Administrator for the Women’s Health Center at St. Peter’s University Hospital, discuss the target of the automation—a large form required by the state of New Jersey called the Perinatal Risk Assessment (PRA)—the barriers the companies overcame to automate filling out the form, and the resulting benefits.

The PRA tracks pregnant patients’ psychosocial factors that might indicate a need for special intervention; the aforementioned website says it is “for identifying high risk patients to ensure appropriate care management.” The form has grown to 350 fields, some mandatory and others optional which has become quite the burden for staff to complete.

New Jersey requires providers to submit the form for all Medicaid patients for each trimester of pregnancy. St. Peter’s fills the form out for every patient, because it can identify other at-risk people and is useful for research.

The old method at St. Peter’s, which required manually extracting information in the EHR to upload to the New Jersey form, take from 5 to 20 minutes per patient. Sometimes a patient had to be called because mandatory information was missing. As you can imagine, the PRA was generating an unsustainable burden. Sometimes, Goodman says, they had to pull a clinician from the floor to complete the form. With 1,800 deliveries per year, and three forms per patient, automation was clearly called for.

This project was the hospital’s first effort to replace regulatory form completion with robotic process automation (RPA). When Amitech was brought in to automate extraction from the EHR and form completion, the teams discovered that the necessary information was in different fields of the EHR for different departments. Mandatory information was routinely missing. So the first three to four months of the project was spent standardizing the workflow and educating the staff so the information could be easily extractable and form completion automated.

For quality control and to assure staff that the automation was safe, the workflows were evaluated on a test environment. And for the first two months, every PRA generated by automation was audited by a clinician.  Now the automation is in full production and sharing the PRA automatically.

Another great feature of the automation is that reports were generated several times a week showing gaps in information. In addition, every time the automation process found missing information, it issued a specific notification to the staff, who could improve the process of data collection and ensure the PRA had all the needed information.

Mehlberg says that Amitech hopes to apply agentic AI and automation to clinical solutions. She mentioned eliminating double documentation as a particular goal. In general, their goal is to put doctors “back at the bedside.”  Check out this interview with Meghan Mehlberg from Amitech and Michelle Goodman from St. Peter’s University Hospital to learn more about this healthcare compliance automation that’s saving time and money.

If you want to learn more about clinical workflow automation including the benefits and methodologies, check out this FREE eBook “From Burnout to Balance.”

Learn more about Amitech: https://amitechsolutions.com/

Listen and subscribe to the Healthcare IT Today Interviews Podcast to hear all the latest insights from experts in healthcare IT.

And for an exclusive look at our top stories, subscribe to our newsletter and YouTube.

Tell us what you think. Contact us here or on Twitter at @hcitoday. And if you’re interested in advertising with us, check out our various advertising packages and request our Media Kit.

Amitech is a proud sponsor of Healthcare Scene.

This video shares an in production use case of an automation with well designed workflow, that overcomes many of the challenges faced by back-office operations in health care. The automation was carried out by St. Peter’s University Hospital, a teaching hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey, with technology and collaboration from Amitech.

Meghan Mehlberg, Vice President of Delivery at Amitech, and Michele Goodman, Practice Administrator for the Women’s Health Center at St. Peter’s University Hospital, discuss the target of the automation—a large form required by the state of New Jersey called the Perinatal Risk Assessment (PRA)—the barriers the companies overcame to automate filling out the form, and the resulting benefits.

The PRA tracks pregnant patients’ psychosocial factors that might indicate a need for special intervention; the aforementioned website says it is “for identifying high risk patients to ensure appropriate care management.” The form has grown to 350 fields, some mandatory and others optional which has become quite the burden for staff to complete.

New Jersey requires providers to submit the form for all Medicaid patients for each trimester of pregnancy. St. Peter’s fills the form out for every patient, because it can identify other at-risk people and is useful for research.

The old method at St. Peter’s, which required manually extracting information in the EHR to upload to the New Jersey form, take from 5 to 20 minutes per patient. Sometimes a patient had to be called because mandatory information was missing. As you can imagine, the PRA was generating an unsustainable burden. Sometimes, Goodman says, they had to pull a clinician from the floor to complete the form. With 1,800 deliveries per year, and three forms per patient, automation was clearly called for.

This project was the hospital’s first effort to replace regulatory form completion with robotic process automation (RPA). When Amitech was brought in to automate extraction from the EHR and form completion, the teams discovered that the necessary information was in different fields of the EHR for different departments. Mandatory information was routinely missing. So the first three to four months of the project was spent standardizing the workflow and educating the staff so the information could be easily extractable and form completion automated.

For quality control and to assure staff that the automation was safe, the workflows were evaluated on a test environment. And for the first two months, every PRA generated by automation was audited by a clinician.  Now the automation is in full production and sharing the PRA automatically.

Another great feature of the automation is that reports were generated several times a week showing gaps in information. In addition, every time the automation process found missing information, it issued a specific notification to the staff, who could improve the process of data collection and ensure the PRA had all the needed information.

Mehlberg says that Amitech hopes to apply agentic AI and automation to clinical solutions. She mentioned eliminating double documentation as a particular goal. In general, their goal is to put doctors “back at the bedside.”  Check out this interview with Meghan Mehlberg from Amitech and Michelle Goodman from St. Peter’s University Hospital to learn more about this healthcare compliance automation that’s saving time and money.

If you want to learn more about clinical workflow automation including the benefits and methodologies, check out this FREE eBook “From Burnout to Balance.”

Learn more about Amitech: https://amitechsolutions.com/

Listen and subscribe to the Healthcare IT Today Interviews Podcast to hear all the latest insights from experts in healthcare IT.

And for an exclusive look at our top stories, subscribe to our newsletter and YouTube.

Tell us what you think. Contact us here or on Twitter at @hcitoday. And if you’re interested in advertising with us, check out our various advertising packages and request our Media Kit.

Amitech is a proud sponsor of Healthcare Scene.