Are you frustrated when you wait in hospital lobbies? Amidst the cacophony of constantly clicking keyboards? You’re probably already having a bad day due to your health or are in an urgency to grab some documents. But, the persistent noise of the keyboards and the un-ending back and forth of the receptionist validating your information, is only adding to your troubles.
But chances are that you’re not alone in this. In fact, the receptionists and doctors are most probably having a tougher time than you. Having to juggle between consolidation and verification of mounds of patient data and the patients themselves. A report suggests that, while on an average a primary care physician spends 18 minutes dealing with a patient, they spend more that 16 minutes managing patient records. A lot of this time, that is wasted on data management, can be saved and refocused on patient care, thanks to AI powered RPA, a.k.a., hyper automation.
The Issue at Hand
The Healthcare industry is the largest consumer of data in the world, and majority of this data is sensitive in nature. Despite this, healthcare industry is seemingly way behind other industries like finance, retail, hospitality, etc., in leveraging digital transformation. This is one of the core reasons behind the highly inefficient system of the healthcare industry.
Moreover, inefficiencies in administrative workflow, not only affects process optimization, but also patient care. Healthcare should be all about patient experience and quality of care. But alas, what we see today is healthcare workers drowning in mountains of administrative documents and back-office work.
Hyper automation in healthcare will enable process automation of repetitive and routine tasks, that in turn will take the load off workforces, allowing them to provide quality healthcare to their patients.
Here are some ways in which Intelligent Process Automation (IPA), a synergy of AI and RPA, can ease your employees’ job, while also improving the quality of healthcare provided:
- On time Patient Scheduling
Calling a doctor for scheduling appointments can cause interference in their work and personal routine. But, making front desk operators to manually book appointments can also turn out to be a long and frustrating task. RPA with its rule-based automation can help your workforce as well as your patients to expedite scheduling and appointments.
Your intelligent digital partner can automate patient scheduling without any human intervention. The bots have access to doctor schedules and availability, which they utilize to schedule appointments. This can reduce customer wait time from an average of 15-20 minutes to just 2-3 minutes, and eliminate any chance of human errors during the process.
Additionally, bots can also send automated appointment reminders to the specialist and patient, increasing appointment turnout. It can schedule follow-up appointments and notify patients about test reports.
- Streamlined Workflow
With IPA you can unlock workflow automation, making way for a streamlined work ecosystem. IPA minimizes paperwork, along with all the hassle that comes with managing it. The digital assistant eliminates the need for a employee to open multiple sources and windows to extract data. It does the toggling between various platforms on its own, without any human intervention, and extracts all the relevant data to provide a single source of truth for your employees.
The bot can also consolidate patient history with latest patient information to provide more in-depth and insightful health analytics, without any hassle. This allows your receptionists and other specialists refocus their attention to providing high quality patient care. Survey of a healthcare facility that adopted automation claimed that over time, receptionist’s admin work reduced from 70% to 15%, whereas, patient engagement increased from 10% to 55%.
- Insurance Claim Management
A study suggests that, on an average, a physician manually has to deal with over 20,000 pieces of documents, in a year. While paperwork and documentation should not be a primary job of a physician, it’s is indeed a very crucial procedure in patient admission, billings, and payments. Especially, in case of insurance claim management. Manual documentation, verification and validation of insurance coverage can take up long hours of human effort, and requires constant back and forth between patients, banks, and the management.
Moreover, businesses cannot afford documenting inaccurate data, it could cause them capital and reputational damage. But with intelligent RPA you are assured of proper auditing and documentation, resulting in 100% accuracy.
- Compliance Regulation
As mentioned earlier, healthcare deals with a lot of sensitive data, and non-compliance while dealing with such data is not an option. Along with finance, healthcare is another industry that has to follow extremely strict regulatory guidelines, to safeguard customer data. However, compliance is a very demanding and strenuous task. Therefore, given the possibility of inaccuracy due to fatigue, relying on your human workforce to run compliance is extremely risky.
IPA can save your enterprise from such compliance pit falls. It enables structured and safe management of all your sensitive data, allowing your enterprise to comply with external audits easily. Moreover, with bots, you are assured of zero data leakage and 100% confidentiality. IPA saves your enterprise from massive compliance fines and reputational damage, subsequently increasing your trust value among your customers.
Hyper automation, with its ease of usability allows anyone, with minimal technical knowledge, to run and configure the software. Minimizing routine grunt work, it increases employee satisfaction and ensures better patient experience. Reports suggest that the healthcare industry is estimated to spend about $600 billion in transformation in the next 5 year, and RPA is a big piece of this. Thus, leveraging IPA today for your healthcare industry can be beneficial for your enterprise in the long run.
If you are interested to learn more about this hyper automation and IPA, take a look at How Intelligent Automation Enables Humans to Focus on Higher Value Tasks. Alternatively, you could also explore Tackle the Post-Pandemic Business ‘New Normal’ with the Power of Intelligent Automation.
If you’re interested in exploring Intelligent Automation to enhance your customer services and customer experience, Rapid Acceleration Partners would be glad 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 tool 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.
