RPA in Healthcare- Why is it Vital?

Robotic Process Automation or RPA is a software technology or use of software bots to automate highly repetitive tasks, typically done by experienced workers. According to Gartner, the RPA ecosystem was the flourishing segment of the global enterprise software market in 2018.

Currently, RPA adoption in healthcare is not common yet. Based on the research, the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) market is projected to grow $5bn by 2024, and the healthcare figure is also expected to be one of the rapidly-growing markets. This is not surprising because today, healthcare systems produce a significant amount of data and involve various rule-based processes. RPA will be known to reduce healthcare inefficiencies and give better healthcare services to the public.

Every day healthcare organizations collect a vast amount of data and information that includes several internal and external sources like lab information systems, insurance portals, clinical applications, third-party portals, HR applications, ERPs, scheduling applications, and radiology information systems. Managing all such tasks accurately and efficiently is the most complicated and tedious job, especially when it comes to integrating the flow of information across various channels. No doubt, healthcare businesses are completely dependent on human intelligence for completing such laborious tasks. Still, it requires a wide variety of resources and costs a hefty amount of money to get all the operations done.

“RPA gives a real opportunity to the healthcare companies for their systems and allows them to stop the bleeding of rising costs all over the world. Intelligent Automation & RPA come as helping hands to eliminate the waste and change the customer’s health journey”.

Importance of RPA in the Healthcare Industry

If you are a healthcare service company, you may deal with administrative tasks and endless paperwork that sometimes make it challenging for you to give the best patient care. To reduce your workload, Robotic Process Automation comes out to do activities of your healthcare system, like:

• Entering repetitive data.
• Inventory management.
• Scheduling appointments.
• Processing claims and billing patients.
• Digitizing patient files.

Based on market studies, the healthcare industry spends nearly $2.1 billion each year on error-prone and poorly performed manual tasks. Similarly, insurance companies pay from $6 million to $24 million yearly to address poor data quality issues.

The systems that are in the healthcare domain can directly benefit from RPA and ensure the high efficiency of data management, finance and revenue functions, administrative actions, claims management, billing and enrollment. From customer support, claims operations to billing tasks when done manually, functional errors always occur and incorrect data are sometimes found in the healthcare systems that make it difficult for customers to trust the services. Due to inaccurate data transfer, customer experience declines, you may suffer a lot in the competition.

However, when hospitals execute their processes with RPA, it provides the following things:

• Give patients single-point access to their information and maintain transparency with them. With RPA-based platforms, patients can schedule the appointment, access their billing information and medical histories that improve their satisfaction rate and improve the timeliness of payments and appointment turnout.
• Create faster, smoother, less-manually-intensive activities & workflows.
• Reduce many internal functional silos.
• Reduce costs from its supply chain via real-time reporting and provide better analytics to calculate the optimum inventory levels based on previous demand trends and needs.
• Mitigate processing costs requests by 75% via automating 80% of operations.

Allowing professionals to focus on patient care, running smooth operations, and making the sick people happier from healthcare services are the intention of RPA.

RPA Testing - Understand the Importance of Automation Testing

As companies are faster implementing RPA and adopting this software technologies into their areas, following the proper testing techniques and methods is critical when switching to RPA as successful. With RPA testing, it is possible to test workflows directly and view the activity coverage during implementation. Moreover, business automation tools such as Robot Process Automation offers a new robust tool for business users and testers to perform testing, mainly in the context of executing large scale standard systems like Salesforce, SAP, and Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Undoubtedly, we have the best API and web testing tools, but RPA tools are perfect for codeless automation macros on the desktop. It can be utilized for regression testing and test a handful of data.

If you are a healthcare provider, you can automate a wide range of processes with automation:

Document Processing

Healthcare providers can automate the processing of patient health records, filing of patient documents, patients registration, and other critical data.

Regression Testing

Using RPA in the medical field, its robots allow testers to perform regression testing and other systematic testing steps. The main benefit of RPA in healthcare is it works faster than humans.

Prior Authorization

RPA can be used to gather a vast array of information when needed by the physicians. The monitoring of prior-authorization can even perform daily to cut down the costs of manual work and expedite the healthcare processes.

What can Payers Expect from Automation in Healthcare?

Customer Service Activities

RPA can provide a better user experience, reduce customer service costs, and use the human workforce for doing the most important things by automating customer service activities.

Centralized Billing Office

When it comes to improving patient phone calls quality, producing necessary reports accurately, CBOs (centralized billing office can use RPA to get many activities done more speedily.

Claims Management Process

An estimated 80-95% of time-consuming and manual claims management tasks can be performed and expedited with an RPA robot more accurately.

The Member’s Enrollment Process

RPA can validate the information by data extraction, improve the enrollment process of new members into a payer’s plan, and better coordinate with human employees.

Provider Credentialing

From performing the validation tasks to collecting the patient’s details to finalizing the documents to automating the RPA robots, payers can speed up the credential-based process.

Benefits of RPA in the Healthcare Industry

The benefits of RPA (Robotic Process Automation) in healthcare are as follows:

Best Patient Experience

The RPA bots simplify front-office support and make it comfortable for the patient’s support team to handle different kinds of patient queries. Both the front and back office RPA approach enables healthcare providers to give patients a greater level of experience.

Minimize Human Errors

RPA bots are programmed and apply rules to avoid errors that humans often make while writing the code in the software or making changes in a healthcare application.

Better Satisfaction offer to Employees

Repetitive tasks harm employee satisfaction that leads to higher turnover. This resulted in greater onboarding and recruitment, in which workers are found less useful or productive. With RPA, a huge satisfaction can be achieved by your employees.

Cost Saving

RPI software is inexpensive as healthcare providers pay employees for manual tasks. If you are in a healthcare enterprise, you can save about $13.3 billion when you automate the administrative tasks in the revenue cycle.

Enhanced Appointment Turnout

RPA bots allow appointment reminders and patient scheduling with automation. With RPA, there is no reason for forgetting appointments. Doctors can provide better patient care and increase their productivity and efficiency in work.

Top RPA Tools to Consider for Healthcare

Selecting the RPA tool for healthcare testing services is easy when you take care of four parameters in mind:

• Interoperability: RPA tools should be compatible to work across multiple applications.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI): It provides in-built AI support to simulate human users.
• Data: Writing and reading of business data should be easy for multiple systems.
• Type of tasks performed: Give flexibility for rule-based configuration or knowledge-based processes.

Top RPA tools are mentioned below:

Blue Prism

It is a robotic process automation software that gives an agile digital workforce to organizations and businesses.

Learn more about Blue Prism: https://www.blueprism.com/

UiPath

UiPath is another robotic process automation software that many organizations use to automate their business processes efficiently.

Learn more about UiPath: https://www.uipath.com/

Best Practices to Implement RPA Automation

• Remember the business impact before choosing the RPA process.
• Focus on relevant and targeting groups. Automation of impactful and large processes is required.
• Combine both attended and unattended ROI.
• Planning and focus on the desired ROI.
• Bad design and change management can cause havoc.
• Don’t forget the influence on patients.
• Ensure government compliance.
• Project governance or management is the crucial thing in the RPA process.

RPA and AI When Work Together

RPA and AI have many common things, and both are very popular technologies because they promise to help companies adopt the complete digital transformation. When combined RPA and AI technologies together, the result come in intelligent automation that ensures end-to-end business processes faster.

Both RPA and AI are technologies that support each other and exist side by side in integration to build a more robust platform for intelligent automation.

Some reasons to use RPA and AI together in healthcare are as follow:

• Maximize the productivity of your workforce.
• Minimize human errors from the workplace and ensure to get the correct results.
• Save your company from tedious. Agitating, painful, and repetitive tasks.
• Save costs and improve data management very effectively.
• Obtain transparency through customized reporting support and a customized dashboard.
• Easily accessible to business owners in the form of intelligent automation.

Conclusion

Four phases of RPA implementation are planning, development, development, support & maintenance. Using RPA in the healthcare industry, you can experience accuracy to minimize the cost and human errors. The other RPA benefits are reliability, compliance, speed, and improved employee morale. All these fruitful advantages lure organizations to use RPA in the medical field and experience the scalability & operational efficiencies. 

Suggested Read: Case Study on Testing a Pharmacy Dispensing Machine