RPA in Healthcare Sector for Better Operational Efficiency

Robotic Process Automation or RPA as the name suggests is the latest technology that automates your day-to-day business operations with the help of artificial intelligence workers or software robots.

Your basic RPA software usually mimics a virtual human worker and automates repetitive tasks. It improves the overall efficiency of the work processes, reduces costs and saves time by efficiently reducing the involvement of humans in the process. Just like any other sector, Healthcare is another industry that leverages RPA in patient’s appointment scheduling, insurance management, provision of optimal care etc.

The primary challenge faced by healthcare organisations is in sourcing and integrating information from various internal and external sources. Sources include lab information systems, clinical applications, third-party portals, radiology information systems, insurance portals, scheduling applications, HR applications, and ERP systems. The Covid19 pandemic has exasperated the resources and efficiency problems with hospital staff and similar systems. The multi-layered and complex flow of information and data integration along with the organisation’s increased dependency on manpower has led to an increased strain on resources and increased inefficiencies.

As per the latest researches, healthcare institutions collectively spend $2.1 billion on poorly performed and error-prone manual tasks around provider data management

This is precisely where Robotic Process Automation (RPA) takes centre stage. It improves efficiency by automating monotonous, time-consuming and labour-intensive tasks essential to functioning, processing and ensuring healthcare facilities to all. This latest move towards automation has proved beneficial to barriers businesses across industries while having relatively low barriers to adoption.

 

Benefits of Robotic Process Automation

On a large scale, there are various benefits of robotic process automation for enterprises. These remain constant for all businesses across industries. Let’s have a look at them one by one.

1. Increased Productivity

RPA helps enable a productive workforce by automating repetitive tasks. This helps release employees from repetitive manual work that can be easily taken over by RPA bots and allow them to focus on more value-based activities.

2. Accelerated Decision Making

RPA enables improved process speed and equips decision-making by quickly processing, large sets of data with reduced reporting errors.

3. Expanded Business Knowledge

RPA implementations allow enhanced knowledge management that leads to increased work efficiency, team collaborations, and improved productivity by effective documentation and mapping processes.

4. Cost-Saving

RPA bots can efficiently replace human workers while operating 24*7. Once a bot has been implemented it costs roughly around 35% of the cost of an employee.

5. Streamlined Compliances

RPA bots help enable filters and accessibility gateways. These ensure your institution abides by basic compliances supported by data related protocols and pass-through essential security testing gateways.

 

How Applications of RPA can Benefit the Healthcare Industry

There are several applications of robotic process automation across the healthcare industry value chain. Let’s have a look at each one of them below:

Administrative Care

One of the major issues that patients have been facing amidst this pandemic is the unavailability of doctors and other supporting resources. It’s difficult to track or have an in-person medical appointment. An augmented workforce, with updated automation solutions, such as RPA can come to the rescue here. With automated scheduling and notifications, patients can self-schedule their appointments, eliminating the need for several layers of approvals. Various AI-powered platforms provide tools to help manage care and process payments. Automating the routine tasks that encounter patients on a day-to-day basis optimises processes and enables greater efficiency.

 

Resource Utilization

Amidst this pandemic, the demand for inpatient care has increased exponentially. With a shortage of essential hospital resources such as staff, PPE, rooms and beds, operating space, ventilators, etc, optimisation of resources has become a matter of utmost priority. With the help of effective automation technologies such as digital sensors combined with RPA, healthcare workers have been able to track essential medical equipment such as ventilators, oxygen tanks, defibrillators etc. A cloud-based control panel is used to spot and communicate the geographical locations of these resources.

 

Medical Claims Management

Claims management in any medical institution is highly data-oriented, time-consuming, repetitive, rule-based and prone to error activity. RPA bots, here, can ensure fast data processing with reduced errors in the whole process.
Implementing RPA into their entire process helps avoid non-compliance with regulations. Additionally, it can also help save resources by checking claim approvals. The bot here can filter out incomplete or ineligible applications and manage denials automatically. It can create a report of all the self-pay patients and their potential eligibility for a claim.

 

Revenue Cycle Management

RPA along with AI technology is effectively used to manage the entire revenue cycle of any healthcare institution starting with claims processing, payments to revenue generation that can only be achieved through pre-authorisations. Here, purely data focussed tasks like bill details can be collected and organised in a consolidated bill through RPA. This results in quick bill generations leading to a streamlined revenue cycle process.

 

Data Protection & Cyber-Security

Medical institutions deal with a huge amount of data that shouldn’t be accessible to all. Parallelly, one of the major benefits of RPA is role-based data access facilitation. RPA bots are enabled to ensure that the right people have access to relevant information. Ensuring this, healthcare providers get permission to invoke permission rights. This helps organisations protect data privacy and abide by security compliances like HIPAA. Every single member of the institution i.e. doctors, administrations, back-office departments, etc. have varying degrees of access to this information. This ultimately helps strengthen the cybersecurity protocol for any medical institution. Automation can reduce detection and response times, automatically deploy security controls, classify risks, and fortify data loss prevention to minimize risk exposure for cyber-attacks.

 

How Can ImpactQA Help Your Business Achieve Complete Automation with RPA

With the rapidly changing dynamics, we enable cost-effective testing solutions for the healthcare industry. With our healthcare testing services, you can keep your applications HIPAA compliant, EHR and EMR based healthcare apps secured. We combine strong domain expertise, efficient operating models and integrated solutions to deliver the best in industry solutions to our clients.
Schedule a call and explore your RPA solutions for healthcare and increase the quality and effectiveness of your applications today.

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