Patient Discharge Process in Healthcare

Every patient and their family look forward to getting discharged from the hospital. However, it is not an easy process. Most of the time, even after getting clearance from doctors, patients need to spend five or six hours in the hospital before getting discharged. Why does this happen? 

To answer this question, you need to understand the discharge process and the major challenges that patients face. In the upcoming video, our faculty member, Mr Shivakumar Krishnamurthy, will talk about how challenges related to the patient discharge process can be resolved. 

In this video, you learnt that the discharge process starts with the physician recommending that the patient is cured enough to be discharged through the discharge sign-off. You also learnt that the entire discharge process takes about half a day and usually becomes tedious for patients and their families. If the patient has opted for insurance, they need to get approval from the insurer before the discharge happens. The insurer verifies the bills, looks at the limits and approves the same. The whole process usually takes about three to four hours. 

The major challenges in the patient discharge process are as follows:

• Manual process
• Huge scope for errors
• Delay in the process owing to the involvement of multiple stakeholders 

This tediousness experienced in the process paves the way to innovative tech solutions. An integrated AI-driven technology solution can be implemented for faster bill clearances. You understood that this AI-driven document reading technology extracts billing information from scanned bills. It provides for a seamless workflow interface for the approver. 

As a result of this:

• The overall processing time is reduced to less than 15 minutes, thereby saving time;  
• Patients are satisfied, as they do not need to wait for a long time at the hospital; and 
• Beds are utilised more efficiently and made available to other patients sooner. 

In this segment, you have learnt about the challenges faced in the patient discharge process and ways to mitigate them through AI-driven reading systems. In the next segment, you will learn about a few considerations and implications of these technological interventions for healthcare managers.