Provide an Enhanced Patient Experience with Intelligent Automation

So you want to enhance the healthcare process efficiency and create a better workplace experience but adapting to the change is challenging. It’s time to wipe out those challenges by embracing RPA in the healthcare process and reimagining the patient care experience. But how to choose the process, what to consider before RPA adoption, and how to scale the automation in healthcare, these questions must be answered before embarking on RPA in healthcare.

What is RPA in Healthcare?

Manual healthcare operations hugely impact the efficiency and completely ruin the patient experience. Since healthcare businesses operate in real-time, the precision and turnaround times play a crucial role in garnering efficiency. Moreover, staff and patient experience also matter in this process. Hence performing healthcare operations manually leads to higher healthcare operational cost, and longer turnaround time in offering healthcare to patients.
To eradicate these challenges RPA technology and automation tools can be the vital solution to offer value-based care. RPA in healthcare can automate the repetitive process like patient registration, data verification and many others to give healthcare professionals ample time to use their skills in patient care.
RPA in healthcare market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 8.4%, reaching a valuation of $88.9 billion by the end of 2028 due to growing concern of affordable healthcare access.
So let’s see what else hyperautomation can do for the healthcare segment and benefits it beings to the healthcare professionals.

Healthcare Automation Market

Over the past few years, the healthcare industry has witnessed a lot of changes: growing technology adoption, changes in patient preferences, demand for easy data accessibility and a lot more. That is the reason healthcare automation companies are adopting technologies like RPA to reduce manual intervention in the healthcare process and implement bots to take care of the tasks.

Healthcare Automation Market, 2021-2028

Trends in Healthcare Automation that are Affecting the Future of Healthcare

Trends in Healthcare Automation that are affecting the future of healthcare

  • Rapidly Evolved Patient Requirements
    Patients expect 24/7 assistance for their health checks and diagnosis, which paved the way for automation and AI across the organization.
  • AI In Healthcare
    AI in healthcare can go beyond just automating repetitive tasks and adding intelligence into healthcare processes for better data management, virtual assistance, and personalized patient care experience.
  • Bridging the Healthcare-Technology Gap
    RPA in healthcare and AI have proven to be the sure-shot solution to bridge the technology and healthcare gap.
  • Intelligent Apps
    Apps with ML, and NLP can augment human activity to collect insights that lead to better virtual care, homecare and patient care
  • Smart Data Management
    Application of RPA in healthcare leads to better management of electronic health records and share data access to patients, providers, and suppliers.
  • Internet of Things (IoT)
    IoT leverages human-machine interaction with wireless trackers that help to perform and monitor real-time healthcare operations.

Scope of RPA in Healthcare

RPA in healthcare can be leveraged into multiple healthcare processes that are repetitive and take highly manual efforts. Right from data entry and integration processes to decision-making processes, robotics automation in healthcare and homecare can be utilized in multiple healthcare processes. RPA tools and AI technologies have significant potential to handle multiple healthcare processes such as patient scheduling, registration, electronic health record management, admission and discharge process, claims processing, and a lot more. Putting automation at work can bring better process excellence, reduced manual efforts, and better patient care.

Scope of RPA in Healthcare

Challenges of RPA in Healthcare that Healthcare Organisations Struggle with

Right from patient scheduling to processing claims payment, the healthcare service desk agent has to go through an overhaul of tasks and workflow that makes the work challenging. On top of that, if the patient volume is high, handling multiple tasks at a time and offering resolution become more hectic that hampers the patient experience. Let’s have a look at some of the challenges that healthcare and homecare automation companies struggle with-

  • Cyber Security
    Healthcare data is susceptible to leak or theft. In the US market, over 13 million healthcare or patient records are being stolen and sold every year. Most of these comprise IT incidents involving humans in the security chain. Hence, data privacy and confidentiality is the greatest concern for any healthcare organization.
  • Voluminous Data Processing
    Manually decoding and processing data or using various tools to do so is truly cumbersome and time-consuming. Additionally, storing this patient data siloed in legacy systems and extending its access to the respective healthcare professionals is indeed a complex process.
  • Curbing Escalating Costs
    Healthcare providers are under the immense pressure of pulling down the cost of the case while increasing the quality and yet boosting revenues. This is the biggest challenge for this industry as they operate in real-time, which rarely allows them to optimize resources.
  • Staff Volatility
    According to a Mercer report, within the next five years, the U.S. faces a projected shortage of more than 3.2 million lower-wage healthcare workers such as medical assistants, home health aides, and nursing assistants. This huge gap will lower the quality of healthcare services in the nation.

RPA Use Cases in Healthcare

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has a wide range of applications in healthcare and homecare, helping to streamline processes, reduce errors, and improve overall efficiency. Here are some common use cases for RPA in the healthcare industry:

RPA Use Cases in Healthcare

  • Patient Eligibility & Registration
    Automating patient registration with RPA bots can speed up the entire process of registration right from setting up accounts, verifying histories, processing elements, and managing bills.
  • Insurance Eligibility Verification
    Get rid of repetitive data entry of filling patient details from insurance card for eligibility verification and automate data extraction and processing to verify relevant insurance plan information and update the same on the EHR portal.
  • Patient Scheduling
    RPA bots can be trained to schedule patient appointments with a predefined workflow based on doctor availability, location, and diagnosis. Also, RPA bot offer multi-channel support assistance.
  • Electronic Health Record
    Instead of human managing health records, RPA bots can keep track of records received from multiple resources every hour, and download PDFs and other medical details from a number of documents using OCR. Electronic Health Records(EHR) have the potential to change the landscape of the healthcare industry.
  • Admission and Discharge Processes
    Streamline admission & discharge process using RPA bot for collecting data, identifying missing test, flag high priority discharge cases, send reminders, create appointment alerts, and sending follow up reminders.
  • Employee Onboarding- Offboarding
    Accelerate employee experience using RPA bot for recruitment, hiring process, post joining instruction, data verification, and asset maintenance and easily updating employee and learning management system
  • Test Report Management
    Make the test request and report process a lot easier for patient by automating report generation and updating the test reports in EHR and CRM system for easy access
  • IT Service Desk Automation
    Route and resolve service tickets related to data access, test reports, claims, and others using AI. With AI in healthcare organizations can create self-service assistance for patients and create faster resolution for their queries.
  • Healthcare Revenue Cycle
    RPA and AI in healthcare can make data processing across organizations seamless for eligibility verification, claims initiation, medical coding, claims reconciliation, and dispute management.
  • Caregiver Electronic Visit Verification
    RPA can automate this process by ensuring accurate tracking of in-home patient care visits, and collecting data from virtual devices and the information of service offered.
  • Physician Credential Verification
    Automation and RPA tools free up the human force of verifying medical professional’s certifications, documents, personal documents, personal history by verifying the information from public source autonomously.
  • Audit Report Management
    Implement RPA to make the audit management process much easier and more convenient by offering real-time dashboard analytics, create a predefined design for audit questions with drag & drop, and capture data with a multichannel approach
  • Asset Management
    RPA bots can be easily enrolled in recording newly enrolled devices, allocation/de-allocation of assets, asset return management, and email or alert generation at the time of upgrade or damaged assets, and others.
  • Data Analytics
    RPA in healthcare can integrate data collected across the organization and utilizing AI in healthcare record management enables real-time insight for better diagnosis and patient treatment for further care plans.
  • Claims Processing
    Automation and RPA tools help in claim management by autonomously populating insurance fields, applying relevant regular fields, preparing claims documents, and storing data in centralised systems.
  • Healthcare Insurance Document Automation
    Utilizing RPA in Healthcare insurance document automation, streamlines insurance-related paperwork by using technology to extract, validate, generate, and process documents. It improves efficiency, reduces errors, and ensures compliance in healthcare insurance operations.

Transform Healthcare
with AutomationEdge RPA

Know More

Benefits of RPA in Healthcare

In various industries, including healthcare, there is a compelling case for replacing routine, repetitive tasks with software robots, largely due to the tangible advantages of robotic process automation (RPA).

In essence, automated processes offer notable advantages: they are swifter, more efficient, and less prone to errors, ultimately leading to the elimination of redundancy and the simplification of workflows. This acceleration, in turn, expedites healthcare processes, ultimately enhancing the overall delivery of healthcare services. Some of the benefits of using RPA in healthcare are-

Benefits of RPA in Healthcare

  • Better Data Interoperability
    Leveraging AI technologies like Machine Learning, and OCR, healthcare providers can create an ecosystem of intelligent document processing that can easily collect information from any system, in any format and enable easier data access.
  • Improve Healthcare Monitoring
    Easy data access and real time insights collected from medical records enable clinicians and healthcare professionals to offer better diagnosis, and treatment pre and post discharge. Also, these RPA bots can generate red flag in case of any discrepancies or emergency situation and alert the patients.
  • Streamline Workflow Management
    By reducing error and manual intervention in the healthcare process right from patient scheduling to claims management, RPA in healthcare offers better healthcare workflow as employees are out of the repetitive task and highly focused on adding value in patient care.
  • Stronger Billing in Cycle
    Using AI in healthcare enables medical billers to easily extract, analyze, validate, and update the patient’s bill for payment initiation and report management autonomously.
  • Cost Management
    By automating the healthcare process RPA rules out the requirement of paper intensive process, and limit the requirement of human that leads to reduction in operational cost. And healthcare Providers can utilise the for enhancing patient care management.
  • Efficient Revenue Cycle Management
    Revenue cycles and medical billing criteria include massive code changes, which are burdensome for the healthcare systems. RPA seamlessly adapts to these dynamic requirements to establish overall coherence to simplify medical billing and revenue management. In fact, RPA eradicates all the hiccups associated with healthcare claim management for quicker resolution and enhanced customer satisfaction.

AccentCare Reduces 70% of TAT in EMR Scheduler- Patient Visit Assignment

“With AutomationEdge’s RPA so far we have generated 1.2 million worth of annual cost savings with vaccine and EHR automation. The best part of our automation story was that we could achieve a 70% TAT reduction in EMR scheduler- patient visit assignment and 80% in tablet asset management record TAT.”

Jason Woodford,
Director – Enterprise Automation,
AccentCare

How to Choose an RPA Company for Healthcare Automation Solutions?

As RPA is slipping into the dominance, choosing the perfect fit solution is a challenge for healthcare organisation. Keep the below points in consideration while choosing RPA company for healthcare automation. So choose a RPA vendor that offers-

  • Ease of Use
  • Go Beyond RPA
  • Meet the Compliance Standards
  • Offer Integration with Associated RPA Solutions
  • Give Vendor Support
  • Offer Partner Ecosystem and Marketplace
  • Variable Pricing Model
  • Dashboard and Report Insights

Ask these Questions to Determine If RPA Implementation is Appropriate?

Before Implementing RPA in Healthcare process, it is must to consider the full effect of the newly implemented RPA workforce. Answering these questions will let you get the full advantage of RPA solutions in healthcare. RPA Questions to ask before getting started-

  • Is business wise and organisational driven RPA vision define for RPA project?
  • Is the process selected perfect fit as per business?
  • What is Return on Investment and when will organisation realise a positive ROI?
  • Is the selected process fully optimised and documents?
  • Who will be trained to manage RPA systems?
  • Is security breaches are considered?
  • Will a knowledge repository be created after implementation

Why Choose AutomationEdge Hyperautomation Platform?

AutomationEdge’s hyperautomation has robust analytical tools and capabilities and it excels beyond traditional RPA to handles both structured and unstructured data. This enables firms to get critical organizational insights by accessing and analysing data that has previously been inaccessible.

Unstructured data can be converted into structured data for usage with RPA technologies via hyperautomation. This relationship exemplifies how many digital tools operate in unison to provide unrivalled efficiency.

  • Cost Saving
    Cloud computing reduces the cost of hardware and software ownership and maintenance while improving uptime
  • Scalability
    A cloud solution is a highly scalable choice that can easily satisfy your growing operational requirement.
  • High Security and Compliance
    AutomationEdge’s Cloud has been thoroughly tested and complies with ISO/IEC 27001:2013 worldwide cloud security standards and recommendations.
  • High Availability
    AutomationEdge’s Cloud ensures that your bots have the best possible uptime, allowing them to work more efficiently.

As of now, we have explored how RPA in healthcare can bring a lot of benefits for healthcare providers, from automating processes like patient scheduling and EHR management to facilitating seamless communication between patients and healthcare providers using virtual assistants and bots. In our next set of blogs, we are going to discuss RPA in healthcare use cases in brief.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

  • What is RPA in Healthcare?
    RPA in healthcare includes the use of software robots to mimic the time consuming and repetitive healthcare process like medical record management, patient scheduling, claims processing, employee onboarding and many other. By taking over the manual process, RPA bots give ample time to employees to focus on decision making process.
  • How much does Robotic Process Automation cost?
    RPA implementation cost in an organisation very from vendor to vendor. Following factors like complexity of bot, time and effort required for business process analysis, cost of all APIs and apps, and coding required for RPA implementation affect the pricing structure.
  • How can we apply RPA in the healthcare industry?
    Healthcare organisations include multiple healthcare process that requires manual effort ranging from data access to processing claims. Also, high volume medical record management and effectively handling healthcare life cycle requires constant focus of employees, Here, RPA in healthcare can be leveraged to automate manual process like data sharing, revenue cycle, and patient scheduling so that healthcare professionals can offer value based care.
  • What are the Examples of RPA in healthcare?
    Some examples of RPA in healthcare includes, Electronic Health Record Management, Patient Scheduling, Claims processing, Revenue Cycle, Asset management, Admission & Discharge process and more.

Other Articles in the Series