The Healthcare sector is one of the economy’s most regulated and demanding industries. As a result, healthcare professionals continuously face increasing administrative work, which seems to have driven down operational efficiency and patient care services.
Given the ever-increasing health crisis and predicaments, the healthcare sector is evolving to meet these health crises while finding answers to the pile of administrative work. To this end, Robotic Process Automation is being used to better the Electronic Health Records (EHR) system.
What is EHR (Electronic Health Records) Processing?
Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are real-time, electronic, patient-centered records maintained by the patient’s provider over time and made available to anyone authorized to see them. These electronic health records (EHRs) include a broad spectrum of medical information, such as the patients
- Medical histories
- Medications
- Diagnoses
- Treatment plans
- Laboratory test results
- Allergies
- Immunization dates
- Radiology images
Electronic Health Records (EHRs) allow for intelligent, evidence-based tools to assist healthcare professionals in making better, informed judgments and conclusions on the best way to treat patients. When employed adequately, EHRs help automate clinician workflows, significantly improving patient care quality.
However, integrating Electronic Health Record systems in vast, integrated healthcare delivery networks has not panned out exactly as envisioned. Today, EHRs are considered monolithic, difficult to use, costly to configure, and inflexible. This is usually a result of many of the popular EHRs systems being built on older technologies which often reflect on their ease of use.
Many healthcare professionals, including surgeons, find these older technologies difficult to use and complex, making the EHR system perform way below expectations in delivering their preferred healthcare processes.
How Can Electronic Health Records Be Improved?
Rather than changing an entire EHRs root and system, the imperfections can be corrected using Robotic Process Automation (RPA). RPA primarily allows digital labor to keep what works while fixing underlying issues.
Robotic process automation, or RPA, uses software algorithms and scripts to securely and efficiently automate the tasks the human resources in an organization would otherwise perform.
RPA often means uncovering error-prone and repetitive tasks by human resources and integrating robots to accomplish such tasks. The benefits? RPA offers many benefits across different sectors and, most importantly, in the healthcare sector, which will be discussed as we move forward.
What Processes in EHR Can Be Automated with RPA
Patient And Appointment Registration
Robotic process automation (RPA) can effectively automate all patient data entry, transfer of registered information to patient records, and add relevant appointments to the EHR’s schedule. As mentioned, RPA uses bots to perform all the clicking, copying, pasting, and pointing, saving precious hours and human efforts and allowing staff and healthcare professionals to focus more on higher-value operations.
Report Management
Robotic process automation (RPA) can also assist healthcare professionals in running reports of billing payments and submissions through automation. By compiling these reports, healthcare staff can access charges based on individual providers, insurance carriers, and individualized patients. Asides from running reports, RPA also helped to oversee payments and bills earned every calendar month and analyzed to determine the industry’s trajectory.
Regulatory Compliance
With Robotic Process Automation (RPA), all regulatory processes in a healthcare company are automatically tracked, traced, recorded, and categorized in a structured pattern. This helps healthcare companies always be prepared for impromptu and external audits whenever requested.
Here is a preview of automating patients’ profiles and appointments creation in DrChrono EHR with RPA (the data input is a simple Google Spreadsheet with raw data):