This is the 2^nd blog in RPA in Healthcare Series, in the 1^st blog we have discussed How RPA is Changing the Healthcare Industry and in this blog, we will see the use cases and benefits of RPA in Healthcare.

According to Gartner, “50% of US healthcare providers will invest in RPA in the next three years.” Gartner continues, “Healthcare providers are caught in a perfect storm of shrinking payments, improving outcomes, enhancing the experience, and bolstering credentials. Any technology implemented to help these providers improve delivery and streamline operations must also optimize costs.”

RPA use cases in healthcare

1. Scheduling Appointments

Today, patients can easily book their appointments online. During registration, a patient provides a lot of data, including diagnosis and insurance info. Further arrangements can then be scheduled based on that data. However, that process is time-consuming and monotonous.

Other times, an appointment has to be made based on the schedule of the specialist doctors. Or a doctor may rush to attend to an emergency before the appointment is fulfilled. If that’s the case, a healthcare provider may need to reschedule the patient’s appointment. Therefore, your patients should be informed in advance to reduce inconveniences when that happens. Booking and canceling appointments manually can be complicated. That’s why healthcare organizations should implement RPA.

Everything involved in making and rescheduling appointments becomes easy with RPA. With bots, patient data collection and processing can be automated. Besides, it’s easy to schedule an appointment based on diagnoses and the availability of specialists required. RPA makes it easy to scan patient data, generate reports, and forward them to referral management personnel to schedule an appointment.

Through robotics, healthcare providers can configure and send notifications to their patients when the doctor isn’t available. If the required specialist is not available, RPA software can track the doctor’s schedule and disperse the right alerts. And that makes the Management of appointment schedules easier.

2. Medical Billing

The medical billing process is not done by a single entity in a healthcare organization. There is the participation of different sections across the whole healthcare organization. The billing department, administration, and clinicians participate in the billing process. Sometimes, the billing process becomes complex as payment may not be made upfront. And that’s where automation in medical billing comes.

RPA helps automate accounts payable and data digitization, which improves billing efficiency. A digitized billing system can also reduce human errors in billing that occur when dealing with paperwork because the staff can review bills entered into the system.

The patient’s total bill is a result of many things. These range from tests, prescriptions, food, nursing charges, accommodation, and doctors’ fees. Keeping a record of all that manually can burden the healthcare staff. That’s why robotic process automation will be a great idea. Through RPA software, a patient’s bill is calculated with accuracy. Besides, the hospital management can configure the software to send patients notifications about their bills, payments, and receipts. And that reduces delays and inaccuracies.

3. Claim Management

Many patients use health insurance. Making claims involves complex procedures, data entry, processing, and evaluation as a healthcare provider. There is also handling appeals arising from the whole treatment and claim process.

Many inaccuracies and inefficiencies will occur without using technology to streamline claim management. Therefore, using RPA, healthcare organizations can send claims to insurance companies with ease. Failure to update claims can affect hospitals’ cash flow. Besides, complying with regulations minimizes the rejection of claims.

Healthcare providers can implement RPA to manage insurance claims. It helps to ease and streamline the processes to meet the required standard. Apart from that, RPA bots quicken claim data processing without errors. Furthermore, if any exception related to compliance exists, robotics process automation can help identify it and comply with regulations. And that helps to simplify and manage the claim process in the healthcare sector.

4. Workflow Management

The healthcare industry is a very dynamic sector. Good handling and coordination are required in healthcare. In addition, there is remote monitoring and case management. Every workflow in the healthcare sector has routine activities done by caregivers and patients. And managing everything through a manual process leads to lots of inefficiencies.

Robotic process automation can help to eliminate any inefficiency in managing workflow. Besides, automating all these activities reduces the cost of operation and makes workflow more efficient. Also, RPA helps free up the healthcare specialist from mundane to focus on offering the best patient care.

5. Implementation of Discharge Instructions

Once the patients are discharged, they may go with prescriptions and diet instructions. It can also be physiotherapy or other medical instructions required to follow. While the hospital can try to see the patients do as instructed, monitoring if medicine or diet has been taken on time is hard. But with RPA becomes easy since bots can remind the patients about taking medication, appointments, and diagnostic tests.

Benefits of RPA in Healthcare

1. Easier Scheduling of Appointments

Scheduling appointments is among the vital activities in the healthcare system. However, doing it manually is complex and can result in schedule conflicts. In addition, before making any medical appointment, there are rules to consider matching the right patient with the right health provider and location. That is why having an appointment scheduling software can be effective at automating schedules.

Sometimes, one has to make appointments and then cancel them. And with automated scheduling, it’s easy to cancel and reschedule any appointment made. However, there are factors to consider before automating medical appointments. You can integrate with your PM/HER platform to find the rules around scheduling. That will help schedulers and patients to make appointments with ease.

2. Reduction of Operation Cost

When running healthcare organizations, cutting operation costs helps save resources for another purpose. After automating scheduling, you also need to prevent no-shows. and that’s possible with appointment reminder software. Such software helps to enhance patient experiences by sending reminders timely. It doesn’t matter the number of patients who have booked appointments in your health organization. Reminder software will send as many reminders as required, which could have cost more when done through a manual process.

3. Easy Transfer and Access to Data

Automation of transfer and access to patient data is essential. Many healthcare facilities with RPA allow the process to occur more quickly. Besides, it helps them add the patient’s information once it is collected, which enables the facility to share the data between departments and other facilities if the need arises. Data sharing is helpful among healthcare facilities and using RPA had made it a walk in the park since the facility can easily share the data, unlike when RPA was not in place.

Transfer of data lessens the treatment work if the patient’s diagnosis involves a different department. It allows all devices in a facility to be connected to a similar network, allowing information from one device to be accessible from another device. It saves time since the administration overhead work reduces, which equates to saving more lives more accessible and faster. However, it is always essential to have the institution equipped with technical experts and proper security certification to enhance security standards.

4. Reduced Errors

With RPA in place, healthcare facilities reduce risk or errors because they minimize human operations leading to more effective treatment. Indeed, the automation tool improves administrative operations and lends itself to automation.

With information shared between numerous systems, there are high chances of having greater insight into the process. For example, using data from different sources will reduce the time that could be used for other appointments like surgery. In addition, with the increased automation, it is possible for the healthcare facilities can use the reliability to provide their services to many patients. Or better still, help the patient get alternatives to receive care faster.

5. Increased Patient Satisfaction

There are numerous factors in the healthcare system that affect patient satisfaction. The level of care that a patient receives at the healthcare facility is one of these factors. Other crucial factors that will make the client happy include proper scheduling, checking in, and completing appointments. All these put together will make the patient satisfied because they improve their experience in the facility.

For example, implementing software that sends patients a text message upon rescheduling an appointment will make them punctual. In addition, more advanced scheduling software will help patients schedule their appointments right on their mobile phones at any time of their convenience.

6. Enhanced Privacy

Healthcare facilities need to follow regulation acts that protect health information for all patients. Solutions involved in the case management automation will help make sure the organization complies with the configured user. Only the authorized staff needs to access the patient’s information. Exposing patients’ information may lead to legal suits that can cost healthcare organizations.

Besides, any healthcare that leaks patients’ data risks losing its reputation, negatively impacting the business. But with automation and reduction of a manual process, individual patients can be transmitted through the system from one end to another, which reduces exposure to unauthorized persons.

Conclusion

A successful RPA implementation in healthcare calls for all-encompassing foresight to identify areas where automation can yield benefits, identify available resources to aid in the implementation, and consider whether a partnership can speed up the process with additional skill sets or resources. eInfochips helps businesses to adopt a process automation strategy with a view toward the long-term, with the ultimate goal being the implementation of intelligent automation solutions that leverage both RPA and AI.

eInfochips provides RPA consulting, Proof of Concept, RPA tool migration, and RPA implementation services. eInfochips possesses extreme knowledge and expertise across various industries and use-cases like incident management, customer service, and predictive maintenance to provide maximum value to a customer in their automation journey. We are not just talking about traditional RPA, but also cognitive RPA to automate your business processes. To know more, get in touch with us.