Reduce Healthcare Administration through Digitalization and AI : The administrative burden on clinicians, and how automation can help

Sammanfattning

The Swedish healthcare sector takes up roughly 10% of the national GDP, and thereare several reports stating that the administration within the sector is a significant andunnecessary cost. Additionally, digitalization efforts have in many cases had the opposite of the intended effect: the time clinicians spend on administration has increased. One potential solution to the problem is to automate the administrative tasks. To automate the tasks, it is important to understand which tasks are the most time consuming, and which tasks have the most potential for automation with current or near-future technologies. Hence, this thesis both maps the most time-consuming administrative tasks in Swedish primary care and assesses the potential to automate them. The study follows an abductive approach, where the results from a survey and qualitative interviews are used together with literature and theoretical frameworks to answer the two research questions. The results show that the most time-consuming tasks are patient record documentation, staff management, and patient communication. Tasks that are low in direct patientcontact, such as coding, IT maintenance, reporting, inventory and billing, were found tobe the most desired for automation. The results also show that there are several solutions from other sectors that could be applicable to the healthcare sector, such as Ambient Scribes, Chatbots, WorkflowAutomation, and Scheduling Solutions. Overall, this study provides a priority for decision makers and solution developers: start automating the tasks that are not directly related to patient care, but time-consuming for clinicians.