The healthcare industry today is making the care delivery services more efficient, effective and affordable by adopting and leveraging disruptive technologies. They are even automating the flow of information from multiple EHRs (Electronic Health Records), partner ecosystems, finance and accounting systems, and payer portals without complex coding. Now, the healthcare industry has shifted towards digitalization and has started to adopt RPA (Robotic Process Automation) with an escalating rate.

Across different industries, RPA is considered as an exploratory first step into the world of AI. Increased productivity and improved customer experience were the top priorities for organizations adopting RPA, according to a recent Deloitte RPA report. To perform business tasks, RPA draws on virtual workers, or software robots, as well as mimics human users. It has the potential to lever high-volume of simple and complex data at prodigious speeds. It also performs from automating tedious administrative tasks to utilizing bots for making intelligent decision-making process.

Healthcare providers worldwide perform multiple procedures and tasks like billing and claims management, patient onboarding, delegating medical professionals, collecting patient reports and data, and providing prescriptions. While these tasks previously are managed or monitored manually or with the help of off-the-shelf software, the rise of RPA can do these workflows easier, and faster and will revolutionize the healthcare sector.

RPA For Healthcare

Healthcare providers and professionals at the present time are looking around different ways to advance patient interaction and outcomes, lower costs, improve productivity, and intensify operational efficiencies.

Healthcare organizations are facing lots of challenges, specifically managing and processing information distribution across several internal and external sources as well. Those are including clinical applications, lab information systems, third-party portals, insurance portals, radiology information systems, scheduling applications, ERPs and HR applications. These systems' integration is typically intricate, and most care providers still rely on humans to act manual labor-intensive tasks to process information.

But with the help of RPA, healthcare institutions can improve their efficiency and deliver better medical care to their patients.

There are many applications wherein Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can support caregivers, including:

Claim Filing

Typically, managing claim processing is a time-consuming activity that encompasses mundane tasks and collection of huge amounts of data information from different sources. Doing this process manually and without predetermined regulation can even lead errors in entire claim processing. Even reports show nearly 30-40% health claims can be denied due to non-compliance of regulations. Hence, leveraging RPA can extract defined and undefined data, update systems and streamline the process of claim filing.

Patient Appointment Scheduling

In today's internet age, patients often schedule their appointments with their doctors online. Scheduling appointments based on patient data can be a tedious procedure, as healthcare organizations have to gather patient data, diagnosis, and insurance details in the registration process.

Even for patients, they have to meet their doctors' schedules and their availability in healthcare centers. If there is a need to be diagnosed by a neurologist or disease-related doctors, patients have to see their doctor's timings in the hospital. So, patient appointing scheduling can be a difficult task.

These concerns related to scheduling patient appointments can be resolved by leveraging RPA tools. RPA solutions can automate the process of patient data collection and processing, as well as optimally schedule patient appointments according to their diagnosis, doctor availability, location, among criteria. It scans a patient data to create a report that can be sent to a referral management representative to fix the appointment, with notifying patients whether doctors are available or not. In the case of doctors' unavailability, the RPA software can even track doctors' schedule to alert patients.

Stimulating Account Settlements

Maintaining records of multiple tests, treatment, doctor subscriptions, wardroom cost, among other care facilities are indispensable for a precise calculation of every patient's bill. As caregivers have to monitor, calculate, and assess these concerns during the diagnosis and treatment, it can also be a time-consuming process and leads to errors by doing manually.

So, embracing RPA into the entire billing process can accurately result in better outcome to care providers and ease the burden of the hospital staff. It can also lessen payment delays and inaccuracies in the account settlements process by informing patients of their bill amount and receive payments.

Implementing Post-discharge Guidelines

After discharged from a healthcare center, patients are often given some prescriptions, and medications and are required to follow post-discharge instructions to recover from that certain medicated symptoms. Though, inspecting whether the patients are following post-discharge instructions or not, is almost impossible for healthcare organizations.

This is where RPA can help healthcare organizations by ensuring the precision of discharge guidelines and send reminders to patients about prescription pick-ups. With this automated service, care providers can also inform patients about upcoming doctor's appointments and health check-ups for maintaining their health. In a need of further assistance by a patient for their health condition, RPA can also alert care providers to provide better medications promptly.

Healthcare Workflows Management

Managing and synchronizing healthcare, case and utilization management, remote healthcare monitoring, and populace wellness are such vital workflows for a healthcare organization. These workflows are often managed manually, which can be an inept approach, and encompass routine tasks that are essential for caregivers and patients. Nonetheless, it can be performed and streamlined by leveraging RPA solution in care delivery services.

Moving these routine tasks to RPA tools from human agents can result in cost savings and better outcomes for healthcare organizations. Also, this approach can advance efficiency across the board. By automating such workflows, medical professionals can spend the majority of their time on patient care and other care facilities.

RPA software is essential for the improvement of HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) scores, where care providers can advance their patient's experience, provide better treatment, and cut readmissions.

So, Robotic Process Automation is an essential solution to existing systems and processes, empowering healthcare organizations to address gaps in existing processes where work is still being performed manually.