The healthcare industry is under mounting pressure to reduce costs while maintaining or improving the quality of patient care. Across the board, healthcare operational costs are rising significantly faster than general inflation, stressing budgets across hospitals, medical practices, insurers, and patients alike.
The table illustrates a persistent, multi-year trend. To combat this, health care organizations are increasingly reviewing and reengineering their internal processes to identify inefficiencies, eliminate waste, and streamline operations. Healthcare organizations are doubling down on strategies like Lean Six Sigma, digital transformation and AI to restore financial balance and ensure affordable, efficient care delivery. These process improvement tools are being tailored to healthcare environments to reduce variation, improve patient flow, and eliminate non-value-added activities.
[1] McKinsey (https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare/our-insights/what-to-expect-in-us-healthcare-in-2025-and-beyond)
[1] AHA (https://www.aha.org/costsofcaring)
[1] Baker Institute (https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/prices-versus-costs-unpacking-rising-us-hospital-profits)
[1] AHA (https://www.aha.org/guidesreports/2025-04-28-2024-costs-caring)
[1] PWC (https://www.pwc.com/us/en/industries/health-industries/library/behind-the-numbers.html)
It all starts with reviewing existing processes, the foundation of every organization’s operations – how they get work done. Creating a clear and understandable process model that illustrates the people, processes, activities, and interconnections is the first step to improving a process. Traditionally, facilitated meetings or structured Kaizen events were used to create the as-is process model. This approach is labor and time intensive, taking professionals away from their everyday work and adding stress. This meeting methodology is not designed for today’s healthcare operational environments.
Instead, organizations are turning to AI tools like the AI Process Mapper (www.aiprocessmapper.com) to create their as-is process models. This tool instantly converts documents and text into process models. The application identifies actors, activities, and decisions, and places them in swim lanes using BPMN notation. Documents such as SOPs, training instructions, email messages, and raw text can be entered and converted into highly accurate as-is process models.
Process improvements cannot take place until the baseline as-is process is defined. The AI Process Mapper reduces the time and effort needed to create as-is process models by over 40%. This accelerates every process improvement project and gets the project team quickly focused on looking for process improvements.
Cost reduction in healthcare is no longer just about cutting budgets — it’s about rethinking how work is done. Process reviews powered by AI technology such as aiprocessmapper.com, is empowering healthcare organizations to create more efficient systems that can deliver high-quality care at a sustainable cost.