The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly gaining steam in the healthcare sector as test runs and partial deployments are proving beneficiary results. 37% of medical respondents confirmed that they have already been using Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) in one form or another.
On average, healthcare providers need to fill out and manage 20,000 documents per year. Automating administrative tasks will give medical and healthcare staff more time to focus on delivering empathy-based care to patients and improve their overall experience.
Integrating IPA powered processes and operations into healthcare systems allows for a smart, automated approach for leaner, streamlined processes that enable optimized patient care. 91% of current users leveraging IPA for patient-facing tasks state that AI will improve provider abilities. Let’s take a more in-depth look at how IPA can automate various processes from end-to-end across a patient’s journey supporting healthcare organizations.
Streamline Appointment Scheduling & Patient Registration
Scheduling appointments is a routine process in any healthcare facility. Retaining patients becomes easier when you give them a seamless experience for appointments. Your facility may use a webpage or a mobile application to provide an appointments portal. Utilizing IPA in parallel with your extant digital interfaces can create a fool-proof system and help your staff.
By 2025 there will 2.5 clinicians available to every 1000 patients in the United States. Bots don’t make mistakes, so you can rest assured that appointments are scheduled or rescheduled in real-time according to the availability of doctors or any last-minute cancellations. These systems can be linked with patient insurance agencies as well so as to instantly verify their insurance plans. So when a patient is going through registration, you can easily find out if they are active, look into copay and verify how much to bill the insurance company and patient, respectively. With IPA all of these patient records are fully digitized and can be accessed from any location. Staff handling administrative tasks such as patient registration can accelerate the process with automated IPA.
Typically, 3 out of every 10 tests ordered can’t be found and patient charts cannot be found on 30% of visits. IPA systems for patient registration eliminate these difficulties and minimize manual intervention. Doctors can easily access diagnostic records, test results as well as previous prescriptions. Overall, this means faster and more efficient services for your patients.
Automate Discharge Procedures
In general patient discharge processes are time consuming. With an IPA assisted Patient Management System (PMS), manual intervention can be minimized – simplifying and accelerating the process. Bots can be deployed to automate said discharge cycles, extending into post-discharge instructions including prescription instructions, follow-up appointments, recommendations etc.
Accurate Medical Coding
IPA can also assist healthcare staff with medical coding procedures that are extremely detailed and structure-oriented. Each treatment and diagnosis must be codified and today medical procedures include a mandatory COVID-19 test prior to any surgery. However, there is a different code if the test is not a pre-surgery test and simply testing patient symptoms. Errors in this process could lead to extremely unfortunate outcomes such as a claim not being paid, or resubmission of corrected documents being required.
Expedite Insurance Claim & Billing Management
60% of tasks completed by healthcare professionals can be automated and up to 95% of claims management tasks for healthcare payers can move faster and more accurately with IPA. Insurance claims and billing management is part of Revenue Cycle Management (RCM), which is a long and complex process. After patients have been billed, codified reports are sent to the insurance company who respond with a benefits statement explanation. This document is then used by the practitioner to identify which claims have been rejected, the reason for rejection, how it can be corrected and so on. Most often the mistakes come down to basic typos, including medical coding errors, but protocol dictates that an individual appeal must be made and then resubmitted to the insurance company for reconsideration before you can get your money.
About 50-70% of insurance claim settlement tasks are highly repetitive – a suitable environment for IPA implementation. The entire hassle can be avoided by getting the report codified correctly from the very beginning, which can be achieved with automated systems and PMS augmented by IPA that leverages both AI and Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
- Bots can extract data from various heterogenous sources.
- Bots can be taught how to validate claims with customized rules.
- With Machine Learning (ML) and AI bots can cognitively learn how to identify fraudulent cases.
- Feed data and documents from one process to another automatically using RPA.
You can achieve a well-oiled healthcare system that functions seamlessly and quickly with IPA for various administrative tasks and processes. This benefits both healthcare providers and patients, so clinicians can focus on patient care and leave tedious paperwork to reliable IPA processes.
If you’d like to discover opportunities where your healthcare facility can benefit from IPA implementations, our AI team at Rapid Acceleration Partners would be happy to help. Our next-gen, AI-powered content intelligence platform RAPFlow enables full lifecycle AI orchestration on a single platform. When used in tandem with our RPA solution RAPBot, it provides end-to-end workflow automation capabilities that can be deployed in just weeks. You can even build your own use case and the platform can easily integrate with your existing systems. Book a demo to get a more detailed understanding of how our products can transform your business.
