MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Scaling Automation: Two Proven Paths to Success

Lessons from two leading hospital systems show how to overcome the obstacles to automation.

Organizations faced with a large volume of repetitive manual processes often look to automation to free up their employees to work on more productive tasks. The challenge, however, is deciding how to implement automation in a way that best suits the organization. Which processes should be prioritized for automation? And should the effort be led by technical experts or process experts? A close look at how two hospital systems adopted automation can provide clues to what approaches might work best for other organizations.

In 2018, the finance department of the Mass General Brigham hospital system in Boston was facing a worsening bottleneck in keeping track of the providers in its network. Front-line employees needed to gather up-to-date information on an increasing number of health care providers, but the process was slow and inefficient, requiring three separate hospital administrators to manually collect, aggregate, and export data through a mind-numbing series of clicks.

About the Author

Ben Armstrong is executive director of MIT’s Industrial Performance Center, where he co-leads the Work of the Future Initiative. He has a Ph.D. from MIT and formerly worked at Google. Benjamin Berkowitz is the director of digital process automation at Vertex Pharmaceuticals. He was formerly director of intelligent automation at Mass General Brigham.

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