Automation in Healthcare – Scaling Operational Efficiency!
Nov 28, 2022
Automation in Healthcare
According to PWC, the healthcare industry processes 30 billion transactions annually, most of which are done manually. Not only does this reduce operating margins, but it also impacts the quality of patient care.
Increasingly, healthcare companies are turning to AI and intelligent automation. But it doesn’t have to be about medical robots every time – there’s more to it! A perfect example is healthcare automation. Automation in healthcare involves using different software that promotes efficiency in medical services.
Integrating Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with AI allows healthcare providers to automate complex processes. Eventually, this results in the patients receiving better healthcare services as staff gets released from intense administrative work.
In this blog, we will be covering a few healthcare use cases for intelligent automation.
1. Streamline the patient journey
Moving patients through different phases of care is an important aspect of their overall experience. This means they get the services when they need them, reducing delays in lab results, examination notes, and medical records.
With most healthcare organizations having a highly disparate collection of siloed systems like electronic health records (EHR), getting the right data in the right place has been a challenge. But with intelligent automation, patient data can easily be extracted, moved, and accessed seamlessly.
2. Process insurance claims
A healthcare employee can take several minutes to verify a claim status – not much, right? But when this number increases, it can add to billing costs annually paid by healthcare providers and patients. Moreover, it’s usually done manually, resulting in errors causing rework.
Healthcare automation and digitalization have made the processing of health insurance claims easier and error-free. By applying RPA (robotic process automation) to processes such as reviewing and notifying administrators regarding user account status and incomplete claims, healthcare companies can save hundreds of thousands—in employee labor costs. Surprisingly, with automation, it only takes a few seconds for healthcare workers to check the status of a patient’s health insurance claim.
3. Automate clinical workflows
Why it’s even needed to automate tasks related to clinical processes? Well, the goal is to give doctors, nurses, and other healthcare providers a break from repetitive tasks that take them away from attending to patients. Instead, healthcare bots can take care of mundane tasks required for positive patient outcomes.
By integrating data from multiple systems, bots can make data accessible in one convenient place. This saves healthcare providers from having to manually move data from one system to another or requests information from other units. This way; doctors, nurses, and other providers can make more informed decisions with all the patient records at their fingertips.
4. Process payments
By eliminating human intervention, RPA can streamline all healthcare processes. Traditionally, to receive reimbursement for services, providers had to go through a long process — providing patients’ medical histories and other data from disparate systems.
Intelligent automation can help healthcare providers get reimbursement from insurance companies faster. Moreover, it automates Data Extraction Tools & Techniques and aggregation for claim submission with fewer errors. In addition to automating the healthcare processes like data entry and aggregation, the RPA medical tools offer complete pricing transparency to the patients.
5. Manage compliance
Ensuring healthcare providers are in line with all regulatory requirements is important for legal, regulatory, and financial reasons. The RPA medical tools can help in compliance checking to ensure that no unauthorized person can access patient data, preventing unintentional and intentional data breaches, and maintaining a detailed record of activity logs for accurate security audits.
6. Schedule appointments
Missed appointments can cost an astounding amount to healthcare providers annually. By deploying intelligent bots into the patient engagement and appointment scheduling software, healthcare providers can eliminate some of healthcare’s biggest headaches – manual phone answering, manual data entry process, and handling patient no-shows.
In a Nutshell
Healthcare organizations today have responsibilities to be efficient, and accurate and minimize errors while also improving the patient experience. RPA can help them meet their accountabilities by alleviating the cost of manual work. Healthcare bots can do the job faster and with greater accuracy. Not only does this increase operating margins, but it also frees clinicians and administrators to focus on improving patients’ care experiences and outcomes.
