5 Things You Need To Be Automating in 2025
By Bla Sweeney, Product Marketing Manager
Improving productivity in healthcare brings many well-understood benefits, not least financial.
Conservative estimates suggest that if the healthcare delivery industry targeted labor productivity gains rather than workforce expansion to meet demand growth, healthcare spending in 2028 could be $280 billion to $550 billion less than projected.
But what do we mean by productivity?
It’s important to note it’s about working smarter, not harder.
Technology and automation have vital roles to play in achieving this. By using technology to automate routine activities and streamline repetitive tasks, we can give staff more time to achieve more value-added tasks. In doing so, we improve productivity and enhance patient care and patient outcomes.
It’s why the National Health Service in England has a focus on embracing 21st century technology to improve productivity as part of its drive to see productivity improvements towards 2% a year by 2029/30. It notes the value of investing in IT systems that work well for staff, highlighting benefits that include “less time spent chasing patient data, or waiting for their technology to work.”
In our latest healthcare webinar, Dave Hester, Technical Consultant at Keysight Eggplant, and Chuck Schneider, CEO of healthcare automation company Redpoint Summit, looked at five places where automation can bring productivity gains in the healthcare sector right now. You can check out the webinar 5 Things You Need to be Automating in 2025 – or read on for more insights.
Side-by-Side Testing
There’s a trend in healthcare away from cloud-based electronic medical record (EMR) systems to local client installations.
While there are undoubtedly benefits to this approach, it does raises issues around how testing requirements change. Simply put: how can an organization simultaneously test a locally installed EMR and a Citrix- or Horizon-based system without doubling their testing resource or the time it takes to test?
The answer lies in using automation to test side-by-side.
Keysight Eggplant uses a model-based approach that enables you to test across any device or operating system. It means you can write a test for a local installation and then use it to test the cloud-based system too.
It gives you the coverage you need without increasing the resource or time needed. It also gives you the tool to pick up the smallest change in the user interface and take immediate action, enhancing the user experience.
Want to learn more?
Find out how Dave Hester used Keysight Eggplant to automate the update and management of the Epic Electronic Health Record at UNC Health Care in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
High-Volume, Multi-Step, Repeatable Processes
Any high-volume, high-frequency, and labor-intensive activity that features repeatable processes is a candidate for automation. A perfect example is staff onboarding. It involves multiple steps across multiple systems with multiple hand-offs. Manually, it’s prone to errors and delays. When automated, all these problems are removed.
There are other candidates too. For example, the student information management system at Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust involved a complex manual process of scheduling patient activity alongside student activity. Using Keysight Eggplant, the trust can automatically work across the student information management system, a timetabling system, and its electronic patient records, mapping different activity types to plan the best time for activities to happen. Read the full case study.
At Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Keysight Eggplant is being used to automate activities, including population of training domains, appointment scheduling and adding patient observations. The reliability, predictability, and consistency of automation with Keysight Eggplant helps the trust to increase testing capacity and save significant time. Read the full case study.
Testing at Scale
Validating data such as charge amounts, laboratory reference ranges, and order routing is essential for data integrity. But testing every single transaction isn’t an option using manual testing because of the scale of the resource or the length of time that would be needed.
One solution is to test sample sets. However, these don’t provide the full picture, leaving you exposed to risk. Plus, even sample sets will likely involve hundreds of repetitive testing tasks. This results in dissatisfied analysts, a decreasing attention span, and the increased risk of errors.
Automating this large-scale testing gives you the ability to achieve complete coverage without increasing the time or resource needed or reducing accuracy levels. It can also be run out-of-hours, so analysts can focus on implementing the fixes during working hours, boosting employee engagement and enhancing productivity.
Want to learn more?
Antwerp University Hospital uses Keysight Eggplant to repeatedly test 1,700 medications overnight. It saves invaluable time and resources, freeing up the team to focus on other crucial tasks. Read the case study.
Areas Where Previous Audits Found Issues
Audits provide a vital opportunity to get an insight into how effectively your systems and processes are running. Failure points can open up opportunities to consider where automation could boost compliance.
For example, one organization had an issue with expiring licenses and credentials. To solve the issue, it implemented an automation that looked at license expiration dates and sent a timely automated email to staff to remind them to renew before they became non-compliant.
Automation can also be used to look across multiple systems and pull together reports and dashboards. Leaders get the insights they need when they need it without tying up vital resource to pull the data together. The process boosts visibility and enhances productivity.
Security Testing the Internet of Medical Things
The internet of medical things (IoMT) has provided a huge technological advance. It also opens up significant security vulnerabilities.
Not all IoMT devices use end-to-end encryption, so patient health information could be intercepted. Malicious activity – or simple radio frequency interference – can cause an interruption between the device and the recording system. Malicious actors can also inject false readings such as an incorrect heart rate or rhythm into the data stream.
The solution is a combined software and hardware solution that can test signal vulnerabilities and verify results between the user interface of the device and the external recording system.
Want to learn more?
Ready to take your healthcare automation strategies to the next level?
Watch our webinar, 5 Things You Need to Be Automating in 2025, for actionable insights and expert guidance. Learn how automation can transform your workflows, improve outcomes, and future-proof your operations.
Bringing the Value of Healthcare Automation to Your Hospital
As we’ve seen here, automation helps drive productivity. It also enhances precision, scalability, and security. Explore the benefits that intelligent software testing brings. Or, to discuss the role software test automation can play in helping your organization achieve its productivity targets, reach out today.
