Robotic Process Automation in healthcare – what can be achieved?

To deliver high-quality medical services to the populace in general, healthcare systems worldwide are on a constant quest to be better, irrespective of the challenges they face.

Whether it’s payment processing or managing inventory, numerous tasks follow a particular set of rules which means they have the potential to be automated and will free up time for humans to focus on higher-value tasks.

Robotic process automation imitates a human worker to perform repetitive activities and tasks. With RPA, medical facilities can easily automate tedious tasks and reduce the involvement of humans to improve operational efficiency, save time, reduce cost, and provide patients with optimal care.

10 use-cases of healthcare automation with RPA

Automation will redefine a lot of jobs across all industries. McKinsey and Company even went ahead to suggest that 45% of tasks in an organization can be automated.

During the covid19 pandemic, the U.S. government worked with UiPath to automate the collation covid19 patient data for state governments using software robots to deliver updated data for actionable insights.

Every task that involves data implementation can be automated. Let’s take a look at some RPA applications in the medical industry;

1. Managing Medical Inventory

Entering redundant data, such as patient appointment requests, claim denials, patient demographic information, blood test results, etc., can be very burdensome and time-consuming.

Robotic process automation (RPA) can automate these administrative procedures and benefit from its more streamlined and near-perfect method of operation. All you have to do is enter the dates you want to be updated to the software robot, and seamless orchestration of repetitive procedures takes place.

2. Scheduling Appointments

Electronic medical record (EMR) systems substantially benefit physicians, clinic practices, and healthcare organizations as they can gather and manage health-related information. However, synchronizing actual data has shown us how scheduling appointments can be challenging with EMR systems.

To provide access to accurate information on doctor availability, diagnosis, and available time slots for patients, Doctors are forced to manually feed appointment data into multiple systems manually, thereby spending less time on actual work like treatment and patient diagnosis and too much time on routine work.

RPA bots are designed to offload burdens like this from doctors and medical practitioners, in general, to help improve the overall quality of care being offered.

3. Medical Billing Patients Claims Processing

The repetitive nature of billing processes makes it a mundane task. Yet, up to 80% of healthcare claims are now processed by the deployment of software robots, according to America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP).

Downloading, reading, and inputting invoice attachments from emails can take precious time, slowing down the billing cycle.

Below are ways that billing can be automated with RPA in the medical industry;

• Issuing invoices and sending them as PDF files
• Managing product and service library with custom price lists and setting multi-currency custom rates
• Monitoring the duration of time spent on projects and clients
• Automating scheduled, late, and recurring invoices
• creating forecasts based on all scheduled invoices and booked deals and comparing budget situations relating to expenses.

4. Improving Computing Systems In Medical Data Structuring

Data entry, copying tasks, migration, digitization of paper records to electronic records, information reduction, file classification, and data extraction are all straightforward procedures clinical or healthcare professionals utilize to make things easy.

Process Automation, however, makes all the procedures above smooth regarding accuracy and reliability. In addition, automated classification systems can organize all data and records.

When considering a patient’s medical information and history accessed during treatment, healthcare providers can channel their energy towards what they know how to do best, which is to cure the sick, as there’s Increased accuracy and reduction in errors during data migration and forms of data implementation.

5. Medical Supply Chain Management

The healthcare supply chain is highly complex because it involves obtaining resources, managing supplies, and delivering services to providers and patients. This can involve several interconnected stakeholders, such as insurance companies, manufacturers, and regulatory agencies.

Connecting the needs of the hospital and hospital systems to the healthcare delivery model can sometimes be a challenge because many personnel is involved, which can leave room for errors and oversights.

For example, those in charge of inventory management operations manage syringes, pens, papers, gloves, scissors, computers, and all the items healthcare providers require to treat their patients. But, unfortunately, sometimes things can go amiss when there’s a little mistake somewhere. Not because the employees involved are less capable but because the system is prone to error.

The advent of RPA has brought about innovative methods and new approaches to facilitate the flow of information and products from suppliers to consumers. Bots are being delegated inventory management which has proven to reduce costs and increase the overall quality of the supply chain management.

6. Claims Administration

Claims management involves filing, submitting, updating billing, and processing medical claims and complaints associated with patient diagnoses, treatments, and medications. Managing claims can be very time-consuming, and without effective medical claims management, medical facilities wouldn’t receive the funds due for patient services. In addition, patients would have no idea of what they owe.

Many hospitals outsource claim management to claim management firms to avoid mistakes, but with RPA-enabled computers, medical facilities will be at the frontline of the claims management digitization movement.

7. Medicaid For Newborns

Filing newborn insurance can be overwhelming for the administrative staff of an already strained system in healthcare. Robotic automation will validate research and change insurance Ids for newly born kids to state-based Medicaid. This ensures that their parents face no heavy financial commitment and that all benefits of Medicaid are included.

8. Data Ingestion

Healthcare systems with little or no automation see an increase in their turnaround time because documents are processed manually, and manual processes can reflect errors in data and systems. Since the turnaround time is high, the facilitation of services for patients will be more time-consuming.

The robotic automation process will auto-verify and auto-validate such a system to enable data interpretation. This will speed up ingestion and case management processes.

9. Discharging Instructions

RPA system can send reminders to the patients about their prescription pick-up and scheduled appointments, help in the precision of discharge guidelines and Notify patients about upcoming meetings and medical tests. They can also provide information for patients that need more help with their conditions.

10. Error identification

RPA automatically flags improperly coded claims, streamlines the end-to-end process of managing insurance claims, submits scanned forms and claims to the proper payment channels, eliminates non-compliance with regulations and errors, and speeds up data processing for insurance claims.

The significant benefits of Robotic Process Automation in healthcare:

Cost Reduction

RPA will plunge any medical facility’s cost by eliminating all manually intensive workloads from its supply chain. For example, UiPath reported to a European hospital that implemented RPA practices by automating their claim processing by 80% and had their costs reduced to 75% after struggling to manage 70000 patients annually with 2000 employees.

Stronger Billing Cycle

Billing efficiency is improved when accounts payable, invoice issuance, and data digitization processes are automated through RPA. When administrative functions are upgraded, healthcare companies can significantly economize labor and financial resources.

Improved Patient Satisfaction And Engagement

When healthcare professionals provide high-quality customer service, it enhances the overall satisfaction of patients. RPA bots make managing patients’ queries easy by streamlining front-office support.

Better Employee Satisfaction

Tedious, boring, repetitive tasks are being handled by RPA bots so employees can have more time to focus on more critical studies. This leads to increased productivity among employees.

Elimination Of Human Error

As we have stated repeatedly in this article, one of the best applications of RPA bots is the accuracy with which it carries out any assigned tasks. All processes will be carried out briefly, no matter how tedious.

Optimized Appointment Turnout

Patients are more likely to be present for appointments thanks to the automation of scheduling and appointment processes in the healthcare system. This way, doctors can provide care to more patients.

RPA for healthcare – the time to start is now!

RPA is set to revolutionize the healthcare industry, and with the number of successes it has recorded, it is not slowing down anytime soon. As a result, healthcare practitioners will comfortably concentrate on enhancing every patient’s experience.

Money, time, and effort saved will be better spent on improving the standards of your facilities.

With exceptional rapid testing and deployment, Flobotics is ready to help you build a healthy stream of happy patients by carefully assessing your manual process and its defects. In addition, the automation process we provide on the Flobotics platform is unparalleled, secure, and growth-oriented.