Healthcare

Curing healthcare inefficiencies with RPA

As our population is constantly aging and patient numbers grow, healthcare providers are challenged with managing levels of inventory, supporting digitisation of patient files, optimising appointment scheduling, and executing billing and claims processing. To help overcome these operational pain points, more and more healthcare providers are embracing RPA to alleviate these challenges and drive enhanced efficiency and growth. Based on the current challenges, automation is predicted to have a 36% automation potential. This means more than a third of healthcare tasks—especially managerial, back-office functions—could be automated, allowing healthcare providers to offer more direct, value-based patient care at lower costs and increased efficiency.

The recent pressure from healthcare reform and increased competition is driving a heightened interest to reduce costs and eliminate waste in healthcare delivery. And that has brought the adoption of automation to the spotlight.

RPA goes from 'nice to have' to 'must have'

Once the industry transitions to population health, automation goes from a “nice to have” to a “must have.” There are not enough care providers to continuously monitor and check in with large patient populations for this new model of care. A report by the Institute for Health Technology Transformation says, “Automation makes population health management feasible, scalable and sustainable.”
Automation is often linked to a negative connotation in association with the loss of jobs in manufacturing industries. When automation and robotics were first introduced into the pharmacy, some feared it would be the end of pharmacists, with robots taking the place of human workers.

However, ultimately it let them get rid of medication counting tasks that required little cognitive value, and instead let them focus on more clinically-relevant work for productive and rewarding work time. Critics also point out that automation can’t replace doctors and nurses. And they are correct. However, automation can be blended in to their workflows to make a wide swath of care delivery processes much more efficient and to improve productivity. Patient engagement, for example, can get a big boost from automated check-ins and reminders.

6 Most Important Benefits of Robotic Process Automation

Workforce savings

Using automation to replace manually intensive tasks that are better done by machine can be a big time saver. Paper to digital OCR supported automation allows to input and store data from patient files more efficiently and quickly restore crucial information. It doesn’t have to eliminate employees, but rather elevate them into higher-functioning roles that make use of the clinical expertise they have been trained for.

Reduced waste

Use of paper and spreadsheets and other workarounds needed for an overfull workload can lead to a lot of waste. For example, rather than playing phone tag with a discharged patient in the free minutes between hospital nursing duties, automation can help get nurses and patients connect more efficiently and elevate healthcare trust.

Improved Quality and Consistency

Robots are not subject to human error or fatigue, so they can help provide a consistent basis of care activities and help trigger certain actions when anomalies are discovered. Studies done in US hospitals found that greater automation in the areas of medical records, order entry, and decision support appeared to result in a reduction in deaths, complications and cost.

Higher troughput

Nurses and doctors supported by automation tools can handle a larger population of patients at one time. Instead of scaling up and down your headcount as patient volumes grow and shrink, an automated platform can scale flexibly to address groups of all sizes, adding additional robots is very cost efficient and causes no interruption to current workflows.

More Control

When patients follow a standardised care path supported by automation, it is more likely they will stay on track towards predicted outcomes. Additionally, automation can help detect when a patient has deviated from the recommended care plan so the care team can intervene.

Data-driven insights

Technology used to automate processes can also deliver a wealth of data in a continuous feedback loop that can be used for performance improvement and optimisation. With every cycle, automation systems can collect data on how the process is working and use that information to improve the program. This way it improves itself over time, becoming even more efficient, more accurate and more helpful to the team’s workload.

This changes everything

Leveraging RPA is the obvious next big step in markets around the globe. It is already being implemented on a broad range of industries. High growth companies start eliminating outsourcing by going from offshore to onshore, optimising costs, delivering higher quality, regaining control over processes and freeing up their resources.
This translates into quick, increased value in terms of product and services for customers, but ultimately, allows for new business visions to arise in crowded marketplaces.

Wondering which of yours business operations could be automated?

Source: Everest Group - The Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Opportunity Varies by Industry and Function

Looking to explore RPA capabilities?

We design, build and implement the next wave of intelligent automation. Untrite sets the pace for the industry with the RPA technologies and unique assistance, perfectly calibrated for any of your organisation’s stages of maturity. Constantly extending our capabilities, Untrite helps you achieve even better degrees of business growth via improved quality, productivity and agility.

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