Robotic process automation in healthcare helps improve patient care and reduce operational costs throughout the healthcare industry. Patients rely on the expert skill, compassionate care, and commitment of all kinds of healthcare professionals.
Your medical practice also relies on vast administrative infrastructure that requires significant financial and professional resources to maintain.
Administrative work consumes as much as one-sixth of physicians’ working hours and even higher amounts of time in other supporting roles. Robotic process automation (RPA) is a way to automate labor-intensive workflows, improving experiences and outcomes for organizations, professionals, and patients alike.
What Is RPA in Healthcare?
Robotic process automation in healthcare relies on robots to carry out a wide range of administrative tasks that are vital to the continued operation of healthcare facilities. These same tasks, such as data management, can be relatively simple and repetitive.
The time of skilled healthcare professionals is better spent on more challenging and engaging tasks, so automating these tasks wherever possible can provide many benefits.
Focus On Your Patients—We’ll Focus On Your Workflow
Learn more about how RPA improves workflow for healthcare providers.
Today, sophisticated RPA bots make it possible to automate an extensive range of administrative tasks, such as claims processing and scheduling appointments—greatly expanding the value of RPA in healthcare industry applications.
What Are the Benefits of Healthcare Robotic Process Automation?
RPA in healthcare is a solution that offers improvements across multiple areas, including reducing operating expenses and improving data accuracy. RPA software has an extensive range of uses in healthcare organizations that come together to provide an advantage in these important metrics.
Reduced Operating Expenses
RPA is incredibly cost-effective. Once in use, RPA can reduce the labor costs associated with specific tasks considerably. With the help of an RPA consultant, RPA solutions are deployed seamlessly, delivering substantial cost savings in the long run.
Improved Accuracy
RPA for healthcare focuses on simple, repetitive tasks. Having these tasks handled by humans, even skilled professionals, opens the door to human error. Simple typos and transcription errors can have disastrous consequences in a healthcare environment. RPA bots always deliver the same consistent and accurate performance.
Streamlined Patient Experience
When a patient visits a healthcare facility, they typically have to wait longer for treatment as healthcare professionals collect personal data from them, look up existing records, and perform other administrative tasks. With RPA, these processes are automated, and this streamlining can improve patient experience.
Improved Professional Productivity
One of the reasons RPA adoption is growing rapidly is that it lets skilled professionals across any industry spend more time on tasks that rely on their unique knowledge and experience. This is of particular benefit in healthcare environments, where expert human resources are often the limiting factor in a facility’s capacities.
Real-World Healthcare RPA Use Cases
These notable benefits arise from the many specific RPA uses in healthcare that can be realized with the right RPA solution and implementation. The advanced technology behind healthcare RPA bots provides solutions for many applications within healthcare. Below are just some of the examples of RPA in healthcare that many facilities already take advantage of today.
Payment Processing
Various accounting tasks are often the most suitable for RPA due to the repeatability of workflows, which is why RPA is used in so many financial applications. Within a healthcare facility, billing and payment processing are business processes that can essentially be entirely automated through RPA.
The advanced artificial intelligence used in RPA services for healthcare has no trouble managing the complex interplay of medical coding systems and the wealth of information required for any specific bill. From data entry to communications, RPA can manage the entire billing process.
Claims Processing
Managing claims as they go through the healthcare revenue cycle requires extracting data from multiple sources accurately, quickly, and consistently. It also entails sending out the right communications at the right time to prevent upsets.
For RPA bots, aggregating data from disparate data sources is no challenge at all. They can draw information from multiple sources in differing formats and compile it correctly into the appropriate claims forms and documentation.
Given many healthcare organizations have a wide variety of technology systems, this can save labor for healthcare organizations and prevent mistakes that could harm patients.
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Compliance Management
Ensuring compliance is another area where RPA and healthcare work together. Healthcare organizations of all kinds face the threat of HIPAA violations and the ensuing fines, along with the impact that such a breach has on their patients.
HIPAA fines can reach millions of dollars, so facilities need to know they’re maintaining compliance.
RPA implements a variety of compliance checks for medical records and other confidential patient records. Not only that, but they reduce the manual handling of these records, limiting the number of opportunities for accidental breaches.
Appointment Scheduling
Booking appointments might sound like a trivial task, but it’s one that healthcare organizations need to get right. Miscommunicated appointments lead to patients going without care and wasting the valuable time of skilled healthcare professionals. RPA automation ensures that appointment scheduling always follows prescribed workflows.
One of the ways RPA changes healthcare is by reducing human error. Simply entering a date or time wrong can result in a missed appointment. RPA can also easily cross reference existing schedules and other patient data to ensure there aren’t conflicts at the time the appointment is scheduled.
Medical Records Management
Healthcare facilities rely on a wide range of records, both medical and personal, to provide treatment for their patients and support administrative processes. Managing those records can become a formidable task when dealing with multiple formats across multiple systems.
RPA can greatly increase efficiency when managing digital records. The protection, consistency, and accuracy of records can be improved, and data can be aggregated no matter what source it’s coming from. This saves considerable administrative time, letting patients receive treatment sooner and letting professionals focus on other tasks.
Administrative Data Entry
Unsurprisingly, data entry is one of the most significant administrative tasks that healthcare facilities handle. It’s also of vital importance in healthcare, as small mistakes can lead to serious consequences.
RPA achieves unprecedented levels of accuracy in data entry. With advanced methods for drawing data from physical forms and countless other formats, research shows that RPA can reduce errors across the process by 80 to 99%.
Automated Communications
Healthcare organizations carry out communications with their staff, suppliers, patients, and a wide range of other parties. Many of these communications are routine and take place in a set sequence of events in a given workflow. RPA can automate these communications.
Not only does this free up more time for professionals, but it also improves the consistency and accuracy of communications. Automating billing, appointment reminders, and other key communications eliminate the chance of those important tasks being overlooked.
Streamline Your Medical Workflow With RPA for Healthcare
These healthcare RPA use cases can provide noticeable benefits at any scale, from small clinics to major hospitals. The key is to find the right solutions provider to implement RPA to provide the most advantages for the specific needs of a given healthcare organization.
1Rivet provides comprehensive RPA services across a wide range of industries, including the development and implementation of RPA for healthcare facilities of all sizes.
Our professionals work with your organization to craft a solution that delivers reduced costs, improved accuracy, professional productivity, and better patient experiences.
We’ll analyze your organization’s needs, translate your manual workflows to automated processes, develop custom RPA bots, and implement the solution within your systems. Beyond that, we provide ongoing monitoring and improvements along with our professional support team.
RPA in healthcare is the latest technological solution in the rapidly changing field of medicine. With a comprehensive RPA solution from 1Rivet, you can transform your healthcare organization to take full advantage of all the benefits that modern automation has to offer.
To learn more about our RPA solutions, can contact 1Rivet today to schedule your free consultation.
