The drive to reduce costs is countered by the need to continuously improve the patient experience and meet regulations that often require onerous paperwork and reporting.
In healthcare organizations, many repetitive processes and decisions rely on the availability of accurate data. For example, patient onboarding and follow-ups, medical billing and claims processing, generating reports for physicians and prescription management are some of the repetitive tasks that are common across all healthcare organizations. These are among the factors that create the perfect environment for robotic process automation (RPA) to increase efficiency, reduce costs and improve the patient experience.
Robotic process automation (RPA) is an automation technology that uses software to mimic the back-office tasks of human workers, such as extracting data, filling in forms and moving files. It combines APIs and user interface (UI) interactions to integrate and perform repetitive tasks between enterprise and productivity applications. By deploying scripts that emulate human processes, RPA tools complete autonomous execution of various tasks, activities and transactions across unrelated software systems.
Healthcare organizations operate in real-time, without any slack. Cumbersome, error-prone tasks slow down processes and affect everything from cost structures to compliance to the patient experience. RPA software creates efficiencies by automating tasks that improve the accuracy of data and reporting and enable decisions to be made more quickly. This translates to cost savings and ultimately means that resources can be utilized where they are needed most.
RPA automates tasks that use structured data and logic, and it often relies on a business rules engine to automate decisions based on predefined rules and conditions. It is possible for RPA to manage unstructured data sets as well, but only if a bot first extracts the data and then uses capabilities like natural language processing (NLP) and optical character recognition (OCR) to create structured data.
An RPA solution, when used in conjunction with artificial intelligence (AI), creates intelligent automation (IA) (or cognitive automation), which aims to closely mimic human talent and actions, often through the use of bots.
The healthcare industry involves many highly sensitive interactions with customers, but it also includes many time-consuming, repetitive tasks and administrative tasks that don’t require specialized knowledge. RPA can provide task automation across the organization, from front-office tasks to operational processes to patient interaction and bill payment.
According to Gartner (link resides outside of ibm.com), “50% of US healthcare providers will invest in RPA in the next three years.” Gartner continues, “Healthcare providers are caught in a perfect storm of shrinking payments, improving outcomes, enhancing experience and bolstering credentials. Any technology implemented to help these providers improve delivery and streamline operations must also optimize costs.”
Some of the challenges in healthcare that can be mitigated with RPA include the following:
With pressire to reduce costs, increase the speed of operations, simplify tasks, increase the efficiency of business processes and improve the patient experience, healthcare organizations are positioned to benefit greatly from RPA.
Healthcare leaders can implement RPA to do the following:
A successful RPA implementation in healthcare requires holistic foresight to determine where automation can provide benefit, what resources are available to assist with the process and whether a partnership can help expedite with skillsets or resources.
There are so many uses for RPA in healthcare. Focusing on a few in particular that could yield financial gains is a good start for any organization.
Let’s see how we can apply RPA tools to improve the operational efficiencies for a hospital. Generic Hospital X has a lot of overhead administrative costs and attributes 30% of those costs to addressing errors and delays in manual processes. The hospital needs to optimize costs and resources so it can handle a greater influx of patients which has grown exponentially because of the COVID-19 surge.
Hospital X evaluated its business processes and identified several that are incurring greater costs than others:
Each of these processes involves several manual tasks that are time-consuming and demand accuracy to ensure quality patient care.
Using RPA, Hospital X can reduce the manual dependency of each process, which in turn reduces the risk of human error and increases accuracy, thereby reducing costs. The hospital addressed each of these processes using RPA to automate tasks:
These are just a few of the administrative processes in a healthcare setting that benefit from the use of RPA to reduce manual intervention, repetitive tasks and human error to ultimately reduce costs and improve patient care and the patient experience.
To learn more, explore “RPA: A no-hype buyer’s guide” and sign up for the no-cost, IBM Robotic Process Automation software trial.
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