06 Jan, 2020 | Blogs
Part of our mission here at Nuummite Consulting is to make people aware of the benefits of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in various industries. To this end, we’ve started a series of blogs that focus on RPA and its impact on various industries, including hospitality and insurance. In this blog, we’ll turn our focus to the eight most popular use cases of RPA in the healthcare industry.
To put things into perspective, let’s look at what the future beholds for RPA. An analysis by the McKinsey Global Institute reveals that the automation potential in the healthcare industry is close to 40% and could solve the following problems faced by healthcare facilities:
- Improve operations amid increasing cost pressures
- Aging and contracting workforce
- Legacy systems that are hard to change
Many businesses have already started their automation journey because RPA brings quick and significant results. More specifically, in healthcare services, RPA can automate several complex tasks for physicians and administrators alike, including patient on-boarding, claims management, delegating medical professionals, providing prescriptions, etc. Executing these tasks manually or with the help of off-the-shelf software is time-consuming, tedious and prone to human errors. To make things worse, the constant changes to healthcare regulations make compliance a challenge, resulting in hefty fines and even reputational loss.
The promise of RPA in healthcare: cost saving, improved efficiency and better medical care for patients.
Use Cases of RPA In Healthcare
Adaptive Staffing
The use of automation allows healthcare providers to have a real-time view of each patient’s care journey. It is being popularly used to adjust staff requirements to support the fluctuating volume of patients in the emergency department and lower wait times in ambulatory services. A bot can also automatically update the patient’s Admission-Discharge-Transfer statuses and simultaneously send triggers to the staff with little-to-no human intervention.
Appointment Scheduling
Scheduling appointments is not an easy job. Based on the data provided by the patient, it is extremely tedious to align it with doctors’ schedules and availability in hospitals. And in cases of a last-minute cancellation, the hospital staff needs to inform patients without fail. This complicated task can be simplified with RPA bots, which can quickly automate and process patient data collection methods. These bots can scan copious data to generate reports that can be sent to staff for fixing an appointment. Moreover, it can also notify the patients about a doctor’s unavailability.
Streamline Claims Management
Handling insurance claims can be prone to errors and prove ineffective if done manually or with off-the-shelf software and can greatly impact cash flow. Claims management involves various processes like data input, processing, evaluation, and handling appeals. Additionally, ensuring regulatory compliance is another challenge that can lead to claims being denied. That is why RPA is required to streamline the insurance claims management process. Bots can easily monitor the entire process to avoid non-compliance and flag compliance-related exceptions, thereby enhancing efficiency.
Enhance Accounts Settlements
Accounts settlement, like claims settlement, can consume a lot of time of a healthcare administrator, who has to calculate and evaluate bills during the patient’s diagnosis and treatment as well as maintain records of various tests, doctor’s fees, prescriptions, wardroom cost, etc. This work can be offloaded to an RPA bot, which can precisely calculate the bill amount and notify patients about it. By using RPA in healthcare, facilities can avoid payment delays and miscalculating bill amounts.
Accurate Audit Procedures
Auditing is a norm in the healthcare industry as it is necessary for regulatory compliance. It involves several tasks for risk assessment and is done for various objectives, including quality of services or patient safety. Generating audit reports manually can be tedious and error-prone since evaluating multiple reports can lead to oversight, which can ultimately result in non-compliance of regulations. Using RPA bots to optimize the audit process can help healthcare facilities generate accurate audit reports and ensure 100% compliance. These bots can collect data and generate reports, which can automatically be shared with the concerned department for approval.
Automate Healthcare Workflows
There are several workflows deployed to successfully run a healthcare facility. These monotonous yet critical workflows can easily be automated using a bot to optimize efficiency and boost productivity. Workflows such as case and utilization management, managing and coordinating healthcare, remote monitoring, and population wellness can be streamlined and help healthcare providers save costs.
Enhance Healthcare Services
Using RPA in healthcare gives an opportunity to easily collect, store and optimize a large volume of data for future analysis. Healthcare providers collect different types of patient data including, personal information, treatment, medical condition, and diagnosis. To extract all this information and add new data in the system manually requires a lot of manhours. When a bot is used instead, such data can be easily recorded and monitored to generate reports and identify seasonality or trends. It also enables healthcare providers to deliver an accurate diagnosis in a short time.
Deploy Discharge Instructions
Many healthcare institutions are using RPA bots to comply with the post-discharge guidelines to help patients with specific symptoms. These bots not only ensure that the guidelines are followed to a T but also send reminders to patients to pick up their prescriptions. It can also remind them about their upcoming appointments and medical tests, thus enhancing the patient’s overall experience, provide better care and lower re-admissions.
Final Words
All the above use cases show the huge potential RPA has in the healthcare industry. It improves the odds of success for healthcare providers and is surely a winning operating model. Many organizations have already started their RPA journey, what about you?
If we’ve missed any use cases in this blog, do share it with us and our readers in the comments section below. To book a consultation, click here.