Nathan, the CFO of a West Coast hospital system, has a problem –– and a solution. His foodservice team leaders have asked for add-ons to their automation to enable better patient service and nutritional monitoring. Nathan knows having more connected, automated foodservice operations would give him more data and enable economies of scale. But he has a fixed budget for the next fiscal cycles. Luckily, he’s learned that self-service food kiosks and vending machines are a both a great next step to automation and a new revenue stream. His leaders don’t see any issues supporting such automation. Installing kiosks across facilities looks like a win-win.

Previous CBORD Insights research and blog posts have explored the many operational challenges facing healthcare campuses in today’s environment. Labor shortages are driving up wages and eroding service levels. Supply chain issues and inflation are requiring just-in-time substitutions and inflating budgets. And patient, visitor, and staff expectations for frictionless service has never been higher.

Fortunately, automation gives healthcare administrators many levers of control. Today, automation is widely seen as a way to reduce the need for people to perform routine tasks or as a tool that helps employees work more productively. In a recent CBORD survey, the top two benefits of automation cited by healthcare foodservice professionals were “operational efficiencies” and “predictable costs,” followed closely by “dietary protections.”

Automation can indeed assist leaders with their ongoing efforts to increase efficiency and cut costs — but that’s just the beginning. As many healthcare systems are discovering, automation can deliver a range of other benefits. It can improve quality and reduce errors in work — for example, the automated downloading of inventories from a food vendor’s systems helps ensure that cafeteria operations have up-to-date data.  This reduces the need to manually key in data, thereby saving time and reducing inputting errors.

Building Best Practices

Automation can do more than support routine tasks, such as cafeteria checkout or patient food delivery. It can also be used to manage workflows across departments and organizations. This makes it possible to institutionalize best practices, ensuring work is done consistently, accurately, and on time. For example, patient room service can now be scheduled or ordered from a private smartphone, with controls for nutritional requirements. A patient’s food tray can be tracked around the facility, adding precision to the meal delivery process. In addition, software-based workflows can be easily modified to accommodate new policies and procedures.

Automation can manage costs, reduce labor requirements, and even enable new revenue streams. Self-serve food kiosks, for example, not only remove staffing costs, they also open up a new sales channel. Research shows that a majority of consumers enjoy using kiosks to order food. These devices work so well that they have become widely used and accepted in private-sector restaurants. “For-profit businesses have analyzed their environments and found these to be an effective way to drive revenue,” says Brett Africk, director of sales, platform systems, at CBORD.