Automation

Our Automation Center of Excellence (ACoE) consults, identifies and qualifies automation opportunities. Through continual investments in technology and colleague education, the ACoE provides world-class technology platforms and tools to enable meaningful and relevant automation across the HCA Healthcare enterprise.

Our recent automation successes include:

  • Billing bot. Through automation, a bot monitors purchase order request queues, creates purchase orders and distributes orders to select vendors using preferred send/receive options.
  • Patient information automation. Saving approximately 250 hours of work each day, a patient-focused automation searches insurance details and auto-documents patient registration materials.
  • Education credits automation. HCA Healthcare has partnered with Galen College of Nursing in the United States to help increase access to nursing education. With ITG’s support, Galen’s transfer credit approval process moved from an Excel spreadsheet to automation, transitioning a lengthy method to one that now takes minutes.

Digital transformation and patient experience

ITG and HCA Healthcare’s Digital Transformation and Innovation (DT&I) department integrate innovative ideas from our front-line clinicians and develop, implement, measure and scale solutions across the enterprise.

  • Staff scheduling. Using a machine learning algorithm, our teams have created more balanced, equitable and transparent hospital schedules that contribute to having the right people in the right places at the right time to help deliver the best care for our patients.
  • Documentation gains. Utilizing ambient speech recognition (ASR) technology and natural language processing (NLP) algorithms, our teams are alleviating documentation burdens for our physicians.
  • Workflow analyses. A range of initiatives are underway to improve workflows and efficiency in our hospitals. Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) technology is providing insight into the location of people, patients and assets. Call and text analysis is eliminating inefficiencies and admin burden, and an automated system in the emergency room is accelerating patient registration.

Big data, storytelling and patient care

As a learning health system, HCA Healthcare analyzes data from more than 43 million patient encounters each year. This data enables our teams to discover new insights, examine problems and enhance and innovate new care models to help improve patient care.

Our applications include:

  • SPOT (Sepsis Prediction and Optimization of Therapy). SPOT, one of the first enterprise predictive analytics tools developed by our teams, is an algorithm-based alerting system that helps our clinicians more quickly identify patients with sepsis. HCA Healthcare was recognized by The Joint Commission and the National Quality Forum with the 2019 John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety and Quality Award for our work with SPOT.
  • NATE (Next-Gen Analytics for Treatment and Efficiency). Developed internally, NATE provides a flexible, holistic digital visualization of our hospitals and the patients within, integrating real-time facts and predictive analytics so that clinicians and facility operators have a clearer understanding of what’s happening in a facility and what’s likely to happen in the future.

Harnessing the cloud

Our multi-year partnership with Google Cloud will help create a secure and dynamic data analytics platform for HCA Healthcare and enable the development of next-generation operational models focused on actionable insights and improved workflows.

World-class clinical systems and solutions

ITG is dedicated to providing world-class tools and resources to our clinicians so they can deliver the best possible care to our patients.

  • Electronic health record (EHR) modernization. The implementation of our new Expanse EHR platform at all HCA Healthcare acute care facilities will help create efficiencies for our care teams, improve the coordination of care for our patients, enable enterprise data insights and power innovation.
  • Virtual nursing. Our technology-rich program supports our team at the bedside, alleviating workload, providing enhanced satisfaction for patients and nursing staff, and providing nurses new opportunities.
  • Robots. To provide an extra set of hands for repetitive tasks, tech-friendly mobile interactive robots have and will continue to serve the units and departments of HCA Healthcare facilities by performing a variety of tasks to create efficiency for our care teams.

Operational resiliency

Our enterprise resiliency program is focused on enabling our operation, and in turn our clinicians, to provide care to patients regardless of IT system outages through crisis management, business continuity and disaster recovery pillars.

In 2023, our ITG Service Management organization supported 1.4 million managed configuration items that included servers, endpoints, workstations, and network and mobile devices. The ITG team responded to more than 2.3 million incidents, resolving 95% of IT incidents within defined time to resolution service levels.