By Uday Birajdar, CEO, AutomationEdge
Twitter: @AutomationEdge
Twitter: @UdayBirajdar
Healthcare businesses are increasingly leveraging intelligent automation to streamline and strengthen their processes. Healthcare providers can fully automate complicated operations by combining Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with Artificial Intelligence (AI), improving customer satisfaction and allowing caregivers to focus on their patients.
According to PwC, the healthcare sector processes 30 billion transactions annually for a total of more than $250 billion. What is the cause of the high cost? The majority of these transactions are handled manually, which makes it extensively time-consuming and error-prone. This has a negative influence on operating profitability as well as the standard of patient care. Hence, healthcare companies will benefit hugely by investing in intelligent automation and RPA.
Decoding the Benefits of RPA – Healthcare
According to a vendor-neutral RPA industry survey conducted by ETR, the typical customer ROI was 250% across all industries. Accenture reports that nearly half (48%) of healthcare executives use intelligent automation for client-facing activities, and nearly as many (47%) use it for IT tasks.
Let’s look at the top three advantages of implementing Robotic Process Automation in healthcare:
- Minimize manual labor. Intelligent automation can automate almost all cumbersome management tasks that the healthcare industry struggles with, allowing clinical and administrative staff to concentrate on higher-value tasks.
- Save money. By investing in automation, healthcare giants can save a huge amount of money by lessening the requirement of expensive labor also because intelligent automation cuts down the time taken to complete each process.
- Boost productivity. Healthcare automation solutions eliminate human mistakes from both straightforward and intricate workflow operations.
Top Applications of Intelligent Automation in the Healthcare Industry
The use cases for intelligent automation in healthcare are listed below:
- Authorization and Eligibility Verification
It is possible to automate eligibility checks and prior authorizations in healthcare, which are time-consuming and prone to error, using computer vision, machine learning, and robotic process automation. For instance, an automated workforce may swiftly and reliably authenticate benefits, check insurance details, and securely access EMRs. Healthcare automation solutions can also be used to find prior authorizations, automate submissions, check statuses, and expedite approvals and reimbursements. - Handling insurance claims
Processing health insurance claims is an activity that requires accuracy. The process is often manual, which might have an error rate of up to 10% and necessitate additional effort. Just checking the status of a claim can take a health plan employee several minutes. Although it might not seem like much, the number of patients or healthcare professionals who wish to verify the status of a claim can quickly add up. The annual billing and insurance-related (BIR) expenditures are incurred by healthcare providers and patients, and they certainly add up too. Healthcare organizations can save hundreds and thousands, if not millions, in human labor expenses by applying intelligent automation to procedures like monitoring user account status and alerting administrators of incomplete claims. According to McKinsey, intelligent automation will eventually eliminate 30% of the costs associated with processing claims. - Appointment Scheduling
Thanks to automation technology, which takes into account elements like the quantity and type of patients seeking medical attention as well as the availability of doctors, scheduling medical appointments is now considerably more effective.
Patients find it simpler to plan, confirm, and cancel appointments thanks to automated appointment scheduling. Create waitlists that will automatically fill openings and cancellations. Automated reminders also help to minimize an issue and maximize the therapist’s time. - Referral Programs
As the health system expands, there will be more recurring contracts to oversee. Artificial intelligence tools for the healthcare industry can swiftly scan contracts and extract the necessary data when comparing contracts. With the use of an automation technology workforce, health systems may enhance compliance with regulations, better analyze risk, save money, maintain positive relationships with suppliers, and more. - Making Payments
Intelligent automation can help healthcare professionals be paid more quickly and smoothly by enhancing collaboration between them and insurance companies. The process of reimbursement gathers information from numerous sources, including patient medical history, premium payment history, diagnostic codes, and numerous other elements. Moreover, intelligent automation has the ability to automatically collect and aggregate data, format it as needed, and quickly submit claims for processing. - Patient Journeys and Clinical Workflows
The primary goal of automating clinical processes is to relieve doctors and other medical staff from the burden of tedious, repetitive work that drastically reduces the amount of time they can spend caring for patients. IA is more than capable of carrying out these crucial recurring tasks that are necessary for good patient outcomes. It compiles information from numerous sources and immediately moves it from one application to another. It consolidates all necessary information in one place, making it simple to access and removing the need for doctors to wait around for data from several departments, which enables them to reach conclusive treatments more quickly.
The synchronization of data from many departments, which are frequently siloed in conventional healthcare systems, is necessary to organize the flow of patients from one phase of care to another. IA can extract, transport, integrate, and make patient data easy to access, assisting hospital staff in guiding patients through the many phases. - Data Management
For many healthcare businesses today, legacy systems, specialized apps, and data dispersed across various programs are becoming a bigger and more urgent concern. RPA and other healthcare automation technologies are the most effective and precise ways to combine and move this data. As there are no human errors, no records are missed, and no typographical errors are generated, using automatic data transfer can reduce processing time and increase accuracy. OCR may be used to quickly move data from one system to another without human mistake, extract data from scanned images and transfer it to EHR file systems, and convert those images into readable text files. Patient data can be provided more quickly with RPA, and it can also be optimized for analysis, producing better health outcomes for the patient. - Inventory Control
The administration of non-clinical processes can also benefit from intelligent automation. Payers often keep tabs on gloves, drugs, needles, syringes, and their supplies. intelligent automation can properly estimate demand and supply patterns and help maintain a desirable inventory level thanks to ML-driven data analytics. An automated, rule-based engine may manage hospital rooms and other resources in addition to inventories. - Regulation Observance
Many rules must be followed by healthcare organizations, including HIPAA, which safeguards patient medical information. Penalties for breaking HIPAA regulations range from $100 to $100,000 per offense. Healthcare providers can use intelligent bots to automatically log every action, monitor and record the activity log, improve transparency, and guarantee compliance. Intelligent bots can also anticipate probable fraud and stop intentional or accidental data breaches.
Concluding Note
The digital transformation of the healthcare sector will enhance patient care and lower expenses. Although this process is currently in progress, it must be sped up to satisfy the demands of today’s patients, who are becoming more mobile and want to provide health data via their mobile devices. With the help of intelligent automation, IT departments may use AI to accelerate these digital changes while requiring less labor from employees who are now working with antiquated systems that don’t adequately support them anymore.
Intelligent process automation will save time and money for healthcare firms. By lowering human error and raising productivity, the use of this technology can also enhance the standard of patient care.