Hospitals are complex to manage and historically have faced various inefficiencies. After the COIVD-19 pandemic took a toll on hospitals’ financial resources and human capital, efficiency has become a major focus. Automated solutions are key to supporting already strained staff (reeling under shortages and burnout) and enhancing processes, which boosts efficiency and improves operating margins.

While hospitals have clinical, operational, and financial efficiency needs, automated solutions have served the financial side for quite some time. Clinical efficiency solutions are complex, requiring regulatory approvals and clinical acceptance for adoption. Operational efficiency solutions, however, are an opportune area—not just for health IT vendors and start-ups, but even for medtech vendors. Today’s competitive medtech vendors, like GE Healthcare, continue exploring operational aspects of patient flow and capacity management (enterprise-wide or department-specific) while working to streamline workflows for their existing devices 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. While the latter three are somewhat established markets, the first has yet to make its mark. With burnout issues prevalent across global hospitals, we see the following tech-enabled solutions addressing this need: improved staffing (scheduling automation, credentialing, and on-boarding), improved communication and collaboration, streamlined documentation solutions, task and workload distribution (virtual care and remote patient monitoring), and finally, automation solutions to help reduce administrative workload for clinicians.

This study covers the broader hospital operational efficiency imperative, opportunities for medtech and health IT vendors to leverage and build a loyal customer base, target use cases for hospital efficiency, value propositions by type of health system, and the big picture of how health systems view and demand efficiency solutions today. It provides a revenue forecast for the workforce management (scheduling automation) space and the workforce support (hospital logistics robots) space, along with growth opportunities for the broader ecosystem of stakeholders.

The study period is 2021–2026. The geographic scope is global and covers North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Rest of the World. However, because the digitalization of hospitals is more prominent in Western markets, this study will indicate the potential that other regions have to adopt operational automation in hospitals and the benefits this automation provides.

Author: Siddharth Shah