By James Karat– Inventor of S.T.P.
In the previous blogs, we have seen what STP is and how it came about, but now I want to concentrate on its benefits, mainly how STP improves patient care.
STP’s benefits are many:
- -Speed
- -Accuracy
- -Consistency
- -Cost-effective
- -Reduces exposure to errors/risk
- -Eliminates paper
Humans, by their very nature, make mistakes; computers don’t. They do as they are programmed and never deviate from that order. If you create code that tells a computer to do X consistently, it will always do it. Humans have off days, get sick, and are temperamental; computers are none of these things.
Humans have a habit of receiving information and disseminating it differently from how it was received. An example of this would be “word of mouth,” where one person informs another of specific information, that person then tells someone else but not precisely the same information, and it gets passed around constantly being slightly altered. In the end, what began as A became Z.
The core nature of STP is to be a reliable and consistent source of moving information from one source to another, WITHOUT human intervention, thus ensuring that the data being sent is always correct. An example of this would be whereby:
- -A doctor sends an order using the RoyalMD portal (Confirmation)
- -The patient schedules an appointment (Affirmation)
- -The doctor is informed (Allocation)
This process is automated using STP, ensuring that the information the doctor sends and receives back is always accurate, fast, and complete.
STP enables communication to be fast, accurate, and informative, thus achieving a better level of service for all involved in the process, particularly the patient. They get confidence that the process is professional and easy to use, thus reducing the stress that would normally apply if this was all manual.
STP’s final goal is to be “hidden” in the process so the users don’t even think about the technology behind it; it just happens consistently and feels like the process was always there.
To learn more about how Royal uses Straight Through Processing in healthcare to enable every part of the customer journey with real-time, self-service automation, click here to download our white paper.
