How can Robotic Process Automation help healthcare sector deliver better outcomes?
Every day global healthcare organizations gather lots of mission-critical data from disparate sources like third party portals, lab systems radiological reports, ERPs, and clinical notes and applications- to name a few. Proper storage of this data is difficult. An even more challenging task is to integrate the information flow across different mediums and processing the raw data into ready to use format for generating quick actionable insights and making decisive conclusions. This tedious task is currently done by human staff in a majority of healthcare institutions. It not only eats into the productive hours of manpower but also saps professionals of their energy to work.
With the advancing technology one of the best solutions to overcome this limitation is RPA or robotic process automation. In this blog we will learn what is robotic process automation and its benefits/use cases in helathcare sector:
What is Robotic Process Automation?
Robotic Process Automation can automate various manual tasks including repetitive or tedious takes essential for healthcare processing. Once trained it can use humans like dexterity to sift through multiple platforms, payer portal systems, EHRs, disparate proprietary ecosystems, etc. And pull out the relevant data in the desired, ready to use the format in a fraction of time.
It thus relieves the human staff from wasting their time and energy on clerical tasks and also improves the time to market. It minimizes costs and errors while multiplying productivity.
Reliable data entry with almost zero errors
Due to tedious clerical work involved, the healthcare domain is struggling with significant data errors, discrepancies, and omissions/repetitions and its effects trickle down to other related organizations as well as medical, government records, and research organizations that utilize medical data.
Talking in terms of financial losses alone the industry loses millions of dollars every year. The indirect costs incurred while rectifying the errors are not yet been added to this amount.
By delegating such mundane and complicated tasks to RPA, the healthcare industry can (in a way) become richer by millions of dollars saved on human error related expenses.
Some of the front office jobs that an RPA can execute with humans like dexterity and better accuracy involve:
· Administrative actions
· Billing and enrolment
· Claims management
· Finance and revenue functions
· Data management
Scheduling and revising digital appointments
While digitalization of healthcare has allowed patients to book appointments online, much of the post-appointment scheduling task is handled manually right from gathering patient data and diagnosis information to checking/validating insurance policy details.
Along with burdening staff with unnecessary jobs it may also result in unnecessary chaos for instance rescheduling the appointments if doctors/patient is not able to make it on planned days/time.
It also has other issues like ensuring that the doctor has sufficient time window to comfortably provide the required assistance to the patient at a specific time without rushing up the things.
All these and many similar challenges make it an uphill task for the staff to manually handle these digital appointments. Ironically this new age system complicates instead of complimenting the job of healthcare providers.
With the help of RPA, the entire process can be automated like data collection, appointment scheduling, and populating the appointed time window with relevant data to ensure that the same time is not allocated to other tasks/patients.
If doctors got busy at scheduled times, the staff just has to update the doctor’s schedule. The RPI will automatically use this information to relevantly updating the scheduled timings and informing the patients of the same.
Settlement of accounts
The billing process of hospitals depends upon many factors like test fees, consultation charges of doctors, wardroom, etc. Everyday many patients visit for different cases and staff has to enter different values/particulars in the systems. Swathes of diverse data cause discrepancies and it disturbs different activities depending on the affected data.
Here, automation in healthcare can automate the billing process. Once the structure is programmed in the bot, it will be able to generate automated bills in line with the services offered to the customers. The accuracy will improve, and human errors will reduce to a great extent. Further, since there are fewer errors in the system, healthcare providers will be able to reduce payment delays and financial loopholes.
With the help of RPA, the billing process can be automated. After training the bot will automatically generate accurate bills as per the specific services provided to the patients. It not only speeds up the tasks and streamlines workflow but also eliminate the error and help in logical syncing of the entire data in the digital health ecosystem/??
Ensuring compliance to post discharge guidelines
Post discharging the patients requires adhering to the specific medically suitable regime as ore suggested by the physicians. However, a large number of patients don’t follow these guidelines. It is harmful to patients and hassles some for healthcare providers,
Once RPA has implemented the robots can provide specific and elaborate guidelines and post medication recommendations to the patients that are to be discharged. Moreover, these bots can also be trained to provide timely notifications to the patients regarding essential tests, follow up treatment, visiting schedules, etc. The bots also act as a proactive bridge between patients and doctors by enabling the patient to directly contact the doctors for further clarifications
Streamlined workflow, better career growth and reduced TTM
Using robots for automating processes streamlines the workflow and saves significant time and efforts of the workforce that can be utilized for high-value productive tasks. It not only promises better career profile growth for the professionals but also allows organizations to achieve more RoI from their manpower investment. Additionally, the tedious or repetitive tasks that generally require multiple attempts due to human issues (error, fatigue, or negligence) can be done by AI in one go with a higher accuracy rate and within a fraction of time. It provides quicker TTM (Time to Market) which is of vital importance in the pharmacy industry for the sake of patients, hospitals, and pharmacy companies.
Immediate and accurate processing of disparate datasets
RPA saves professionals from extracting and examining swathes of raw data- a mundane and tedious task that can consume many hours and demands lots of efforts. The RPA can automatically study and extract meaningful information out of this data that can directly be used to take conclusive decisions. It can also help in providing better patients support by eliminating delays and discrepancies out of the process.
Admin friendly features
RPA also promises many advantages for the admin front. The chaos at the admin front causes distraction and fatigue that leads to costly errors and repeated tasks. Due to high levels of accuracy, precision-based processes, and lack of human limitations, the RPA can significantly cut down such human-caused admin expenses. The lowered processing costs help hospitals save a good amount that can be channeled to more meaningful areas like R&D, equipment upgrading, etc.
One of the major challenges is to sift through multiple platforms for extracting the relevant information. Due to disparities in formats and functionalities, this process involves lots of clerical tasks to be done manually. It creates a kind of nuisance and disturbs the smooth workflow of the medical professional. With the help of RPA, it can now be possible to automatically find and extract the relevant data from diverse platforms in the desired format. Such advanced boosts can sign in to different systems, pull out the information, and convert the data into desired, usable format to facilitate quick actions.
