If you work in healthcare, you’re likely dealing with a never-ending stream of paperwork and administrative activities that drain your energy and divert your focus away from patient care. However, you can recover quickly. Many of the tedious tasks that clog up your healthcare system can be handled by robotic process automation (RPA), such as:
● Inventory control
● Repetitive data entry
● Digitization of patient records
● Organizing appointments
● Patients’ bills are sent out, and claims are processed
So, if you’re looking for a solution to your healthcare administrative woes, RPA could be the answer. Multiple demanding tasks, such as claim handling, exist in healthcare systems and necessitate a significant amount of resource allocation. This results in high operational costs and delayed processes.
Using the potential of automation and RPA, healthcare practitioners can address these concerns and improve patient satisfaction by making healthcare systems and processes more efficient and faster. Healthcare is still lagging behind in adaptation of technology and hence eliminating inefficiencies would result in better healthcare delivery, which is beneficial to both the sector and the general population.
However, only a few industries confront the challenges of the healthcare industry: strict patient data regulations and fewer resources in order to deal with those regulations. Financial services also face high levels of regulation, although they have improved access to capital, with Goldman Sachs CEO calling the technology company a higher level of investments in technology. The level of inefficiencies and manual processes in healthcare is therefore higher than virtually all other industries.
Automated software applications are used to simplify processes and reduce the number of human labour needed to process medical insurance paperwork, such as claims. Applications in RPA can greatly simplify the required work and skill in health insurance processes when introduced in the context of robotic process automation solutions (RPA). Automation of health plans has been done on a computer code basis in the past, but the RPA health insurance now is available on a keystroke basis without conventional coding.
RPA does not mean that robots make high-level decisions in the area of health insurance claims. In face it is almost the opposite. The most simple, repeated administrative and clerical activities are automated at the keystroke level for RPA in insurance. Consider the relatively unconscious, repeated tasks of copying and pasting data between the applications. Automating these simple, repetitive processes frees your health insurance claims staff from doing higher, more engaging, interesting and important tasks, so that the computer can do its best — and more quickly and precisely.
Some people call the last mile of process automation what RPA does in health insurance companies. In this robot process automation in health insurance addresses the gap between various applications that remain after large-scale system implementation has been completed. Implementations like Oracle Health Insurance Claims Adjudication, Plexis, and Pega in most health insurance claims departments fall short of the objective of processing directly even when sold. With RPA health insurance, focus is on the micro or keystroke level, which integrates processes that large systems have not addressed adequately – or have never been able to.
What are different use cases of RPA in Healthcare?
Scheduling of patients:
Patients can arrange appointments without intervention by hospital staff with the participation of RPA technology. This application can also improve customer relations, along with eliminating a need for resource allocation for scheduling, as patients can organize appointments more quickly. Online scheduling can be simplified by software robots. The information received via the application can be gathered in a report and sent to the referral management representative who makes the appointment. Factors such as the diagnosis, location, insurance carrier, personal preferences etc.
Management of claims:
The billing takes time following the provision of a healthcare service because of manual and repetitive tasks in claims management. Claim management includes processes such as documents and data input, processing and evaluation. RPA-driven claims management can also remove human errors during claim processing alongside automated time-intensive tasks. Studies show that the majority of false claims among the other American insurance frauds is Medicare/Medicaid insurance fraud.
Compliance with regulations:
The RPA allows healthcare providers to track and document every step of the process in structured log files so that external audits are carried out by the company. Since the bots are used for these processes, the processes have Zero Defect and also improves the privacy of data.
Input/Migration/Extraction of data:
Health care is paper-based and requires digital transformation. Patient information is digitized by healthcare providers so that other doctors and the patients themselves can electronically store it online. RPA bots can automate the process of extracting data from legacy systems into the digital system. And then another RPA bot may handle the migration process when migrating data for a different purpose, e.g. medical research.
Timetable for Patient Appointment (Patient Roster):
The RPA schedules the appointments of patients based on diagnosis, access to doctors, position and other variables, including financial statements and insurance data.
Clinical Decision Support:
Various medical data can be collected by RPA bots. In order to provide accurate diagnosis and better patient care without restricting the rules of confidentiality, for example RPA bots may transfer patient data into third-party health analytics service. This is yet another positive result of the continuous monitoring of records, made possible by improving RPA data analytics. Analysis of comprehensive data increases the probability of a precise diagnosis leading to careful treatment strategies. In addition, doctors who do not have to track very large amounts of data manually because they have to do so can spend more time caring for and helping their patients. This again shows a paradoxically humanistic result of RPA deployment – that technology really makes people important.
Conclusion
The population is not only older, but also in need of medical care when a demographic earthquake is forecast not far into the future. As we discussed, it is important to promptly address the question “Who is going to look after them?.” It is certainly the healthcare industry which most eyes are riveting, awaiting (at least) an answer. Robotic process automation in the field of healthcare provides a quick solution under these conditions. As times change, software robots can provide the industry with a much-needed hand to meet new demands. Sufficient care is becoming more than a simple alternative to an increasing number of people in health care.
