The Healthcare industry is overburdened by high costs, incredibly high volume, and strict regulations, due to which the pressures on this industry increase manifold, affecting the quality of healthcare & patient care. RPA in healthcare helps businesses automate healthcare practices, bringing in a lot more benefits!
RPA in healthcare is all the rage now; from individual practitioners to clinics, people are betting on telemedicine and RPA solutions as a permanent solution to the current COVID-19 situation.
In healthcare, many repetitive processes & decisions solely rely on the accuracy of patient data. Patient onboarding & follow-ups, medical billings, and report generation for physicians are some of the repetitive tasks that are common across organizations. These sectors in healthcare are in dire need of healthcare automation.
What is RPA?
Robotic process automation is an automation technology that mimics back-office tasks such as extracting data, filling in forms, and moving files with software help.
The demand for Robotic Process Automation in the healthcare industry is only to rise, with the global market size to top $10.7Bn, at an average CAGR rate of 33.6% over the next seven years. Healthcare, customer service, supply chain management, accounting, human resources & financial services are some areas disrupted by RPA in healthcare.
In the words of UiPath (the leading vendor for RPA tools), ‘Robotic Process Automation is the technology that allows anyone today to configure computer software or a “robot” to emulate and integrate the actions of a human interacting within digital systems to execute a business process.’
Healthcare automation is the need of the hour owing to the challenges in the systems. However, before discussing the RPA benefits and Use-cases, let’s have a sneak peek at the current state of Healthcare:
The current state of Healthcare systems
Coronavirus didn’t create new problems in Healthcare. Instead, it exposed the broken system. Healthcare providers are continuously working to tackle the pitfalls and create an environment where patient care is given due importance & priority.
According to a WHO report, there’s a global shortage of doctors, with 2.5 healthcare practitioners to 1000 patients in the United States. Furthermore, the lack of healthcare providers & systems gives birth to more significant problems such as physician burnout.
The healthcare system is full of standards, protocols, rules & compliance requirements which are considered the baseline for quality patient care. Unfortunately, a natural sequence of strict regulations requires employees to be engaged in tedious tasks such as updating & inputting patient data, resulting in burnout and increased turnover.
Given the algorithmic nature of RPA bots, they are the best fit for taking over the tedious, mundane tasks and healthcare automation. RPA in healthcare leverages software robots to execute high-volume functions in a digital environment.
By leveraging the power of automation and RPA in healthcare, providers can address these issues, making the system more efficient & processes faster.
Benefits of RPA in Healthcare
A 2019 McKinsey Report highlights RPA in healthcare as an emerging automation technology that’d completely revamp the system.
Let’s briefly outline the benefits of Robotic Process Automation in Healthcare, for that would provide you with a practice-oriented idea about the deployment and application of RPA in Healthcare:
1. Increased Appointment Turnover
Healthcare providers suffer financially because most patients either don’t show up or cancel the appointment last minute.
Effective RPA Implementation in healthcare with a decent telemedicine solution would help doctors send out appointment reminders to patients and even ask for follow-ups- increasing appointment turnover, productivity, and efficiency.
2. Effective Patient Scheduling
RPA smart bots (short for ‘robots’) help stream online appointments.
But, How?
RPA bots identify and record crucial factors received in an appointment request, including location, physician, claim carrier, time, and date. These bots then log these factors in a report and send it to the representative/system assigned to confirm the appointments.
3. Enhanced Patient Experience
A positive patient experience is crucial for the growth and well-being of the patient.
Effective RPA implementation in Healthcare helps medical providers automate time-consuming and repetitive tasks, with additional benefits like data digitization and patient tracking. These factors ultimately add to the patient benefits and enhance the value-based care experience.
4. Streamlined Workflow
Healthcare providers and patients alike share several critical aspects. These tasks include population wellness, case utilization management, and remote monitoring.
The common theme amongst these tasks is that they all involve time-consuming and repetitive processes- a prime area for RPA in healthcare.
5. Increased Employee Satisfaction
RPA bots allow healthcare workers to focus on high-priority tasks by eliminating and automating mundane, tedious, and repetitive tasks. Since high-priority tasks ask for creative inputs and add to authority- implementing RPA often increases employee satisfaction.
The higher employee satisfaction, the higher the company’s ROI will be. The benefits of RPA in healthcare exceed the said examples, for they’re subjective to different businesses.
6 Use-Cases of RPA in Healthcare
RPA will transform the healthcare sector- but for the better!
The Healthcare industry is a complex field with a system of interconnected procedures, repetitive tasks, and multiple players across the value chain. The use of RPA in healthcare accounts for almost 30 percent of the total RPA usage.
Robotic Process Automation in Healthcare presents the excellent potential for improving and streamlining the efficiency of operational and organizational processes. But its application isn’t just limited to the healthcare sector.
1. Fast-paced Claim Management
Claim management is crucial to the proper functioning of Healthcare institutions. According to the United States Census Bureau, over 90% or almost 294 million people in America are insured. However, setting these claims will have clerical errors that could result in financial pitfalls.
RPA bots can be programmed to identify compliance and non-compliance-related exceptions and regulations, streamlining the entire process of managing insurance claims.
2. Workflow Management
Everyday operations of any healthcare institution involve many mundane yet crucial tasks, including case management, discharge, creating and allocating prescriptions, patient admission, claim processing, release, etc.
Why implement RPA in healthcare to automate everyday business processes?
Medical practitioners, including doctors and nurses, can shift and focus their attention on the patients- something that’s imperative considering the current nCOV Coronavirus Crisis.
3. Patient Remote Monitoring
RPA in healthcare offers many benefits, including higher accuracy and faster processes. In addition, these benefits improve patient record management. And assist healthcare providers in creating a standardized prognosis plan toward desired patients’ health objectives.
4. Improved Care Cycle
This is an extension of the previous point. Continuous remote monitoring with Robotic Process Automation in healthcare generates data that can be levied for an accurate diagnosis.
RPA bots are capable of maintaining and managing all crucial yet mundane tasks. This creates more time for healthcare professionals to attend and deliver better medical solutions to their patients.
5. Regulatory Compliance
RPA bots ensure that everything they do, trigger, track, trace, or document is logged and systematically stored in well-structured logs. As a result, any report during a healthcare audit is necessary for regulatory compliance.
Send these logs to the concerned parties, and ensure your practice’s accountability. This even prepares healthcare enterprises to deal with and handle unprepared and sudden external audits (if any).
6. Simplified Appointments
Scheduling and seeing through a complete appointment often includes several complicated (and often implied processes).
For instance, here are the general steps that healthcare practitioners need to follow to schedule a medical appointment:
- Collect Patients’ basic Information
- Ask for medical history
- Check for valid insurance policy number
- Align patients’ appointments with the Doctor(s) on-board schedule
- Inform patients/doctors of any changes
An RPA Bot can carry out the said processes quicker, and way more efficiently, cutting operational costs and promoting efficiency.
Here we have curated a list of the few use-cases of RPA in healthcare, which are surely going to bring in some disruptive changes:
Closing Words
Implementing new technology does pose potential obstacles, but the benefits far exceed the associated challenges. RPA for healthcare is a win-win situation, for it streamlines the workflow at the doctors’ end while offering superior care to the patients.
RPA is revolutionizing the healthcare sector, thanks to the innumerable benefits such as cost-saving and reduced errors. Consequently, the RPA benefits can be witnessed in all the major industries- manufacturing, retail, data-entry, telecommunications, and BFSI.
RPA automation in healthcare offers potential benefits to the healthcare sector while supporting the shift to remote work and abetting the WFM (Work From home) as a permanent solution to the Coronavirus pandemic situation.
Having delivered hundreds of RPA services, rest assured that Signity is amongst the top RPA solution providers.
FAQs Related to RPA In Healthcare
1. What are the three benefits of RPA in healthcare?
The top three benefits of RPA in healthcare are:
- Boost Productivity
- Improve Efficiency
- Hit Accuracy Goals
If you want to read more about the benefits of RPA, jump to our blog here.
2. What is RPA in nursing?
Robotic process automation in healthcare and nursing is powerful software that automatically mirrors processes and performs repetitive tasks, simplifying the business process.
3. How is Robotics used in healthcare?
RPA bots assist in surgery, streamline logistics in hospitals and enable providers to give more attention to the patients. Robots in healthcare transform how surgeries are performed, facilitating supply delivery and disinfection.
4. How is RPA used for insurance in healthcare?
RPA helps insurers quickly gather data from various sources in centralized documents to process the claims faster.
5. How are robots and AI being used in healthcare?
Over the previous few years, Artificial Intelligence has enabled computer vision and data analytics which have transformed health robotics into various areas of healthcare.
Robots are now used in the operating room and clinics to support health workers and patient care.
