With the increase in world’s population, there has been a significant increase in number of diseases, fatalities and deaths. The historical infectious disease like the Black Death in 1350 and now, the world is fighting against deadly Coronavirus(COVID-19).
As patient numbers grow, managing healthcare services not only requires infrastructure but it constantly faces challenges like appointment scheduling, patient’s files management, claims process, inventory and other medicinal supply management.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can essentially streamline back-office work to eliminate loads of paperwork and reduce the amount of processing. It helps healthcare providers not only reduce costs and gain efficiency, but also increase the quality of patient care and monitoring.
According to World Health Organization’s (WHO) report Global Heath and Aging, “In 2010, an estimated 524 million people were aged 65 or older— 8 percent of world’s population. By 2050, this number is expected to nearly triple to about 1.5 billion, representing 16 percent of the world’s population.”
Challenges in healthcare industry
Before summarizing the benefits of RPA healthcare industry, let’s see the challenges that they might face:
- Rising healthcare service cost
- Varying demographics
- High labor and operational cost
- Handling huge list of appointments/schedules
- Monitoring the overnight changes in regulatory compliance
- Record keeping for claims and billing processes
- Inventory management for medicinal and hospital supplies
Use of RPA in healthcare
As the hospitals are working towards saving cost and improving their services, RPA can help them achieve these goals.
- Data digitization: RPA has the ability to record and maintain patient’s data and improve its digitization process, reducing write-offs and paperwork. This will help in processing claims and billing at a faster and accurate pace thus saving the healthcare providers much needed resources.
- Simplified patient appointment scheduling: When patient appointments are scheduled, the healthcare institutes need to collect their personal information, insurance details, diagnosis and check for doctor’s availability. And if, there is any mismatch in the information or doctor’s schedule, the staff will need to inform patients beforehand. With RPA, data collection, processing and scheduling or rescheduling can be automated and appointments can be optimally handled.
- Streamlining account settlements and claim process: By introducing RPA, healthcare providers can reduce payment delays, manage complex insurance claims and identify compliance related exceptions. Hence, it can help in avoiding inaccuracies associated with the calculation of bill amount and effortlessly speed up account and claim settlements.
- Standardized membership management: With processes like setting up accounts, verifying eligibility, managing benefits, billing and customer service, the manual labor can not only take hours and days but also create customer dissatisfaction. RPA helps in automating these processes and thus result in better customer experience.
- Care plan and workflow monitoring: RPA supports utilization management, care coordination, wellness promotion and remote monitoring of patients within the healthcare system. These are all based on data driven insights and RPA can deal with chunks of data which when analyzed and processed can improve care plan and performance.
“We deal with so much data here in our system, you know, every patient may probably have hundreds of interactions or episodes within a day. So to reconcile all the data is really a tough task. With RPA we’ve been able to do things which would not have been humanly possible to do,” says Yogesh Sareen, CFO, Max Healthcare.
Read more how RPA can play a role in battling against COVID-19 or why you need to implement RPA?
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