RPA in Healthcare: A Comprehensive Overview, Benefits, and Case Studies

by Dhanashree 11 min read

Published: May 16, 2022 ● Updated: Apr 1, 2024

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Healthcare is often inefficient from a systems standpoint because you deal with individuals. Everyone is different, and although there are overarching standards, each person's healthcare is unique. So, there is no single unequivocal solution to many aspects of the healthcare system, making it challenging to implement process automation solutions.

Various time-consuming procedures and stringent requirements in healthcare systems, such as insurance services and clinical scheduling, necessitate a significant allocation of resources. As a result, bottlenecks, high operating costs, and long processing times are regularly experienced. These delays slow down patients from getting the help and care they need. Enter robotic process automation. Healthcare is one of the top 10 use cases for RPA .

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Fortunately, by maximizing the value of automation and Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, healthcare professionals can resolve these problems and enhance the overall quality of treatment. Enacting RPA will make medical systems more effective, enable faster healthcare workflow, and increase general patient care and satisfaction.

Moreover, with the help of RPA, medical professionals can prevent expensive, time-consuming digital transformation implementation projects and experience immediate benefits from automation and rapid implementation projects. This action allows them to devote more resources to patient care and better outcomes.

What is Robotic Process Automation?

Throughout the quest to keep up with the digital transformation, Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, is frequently hailed as a convenient and straightforward approach to expedite critical processes, prolonging existing systems' longevity and reducing costs.

Moreover, Robotic Process Automation is a software platform that makes it simple to create, implement, and administer software robots that mimic human movements while dealing with digital systems and applications. Because of this, RPA is becoming increasingly popular. One great example of such software is Nanonets.

While Robotic Process Automation is helpful in advancing the broader route to digital transformation, it usually gets used as a short-term solution. Instead, enterprises must focus on a long-term intelligent automation plan to remove temporary solutions and costly disruptions.

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Scope of RPA in Healthcare

Streamlining workflows with Robotic Process Automation allows organizations to become more competitive, adaptable, and adaptive. Work performance, participation, and effectiveness are all increased due to eliminating routine chores from employee shift lengths.

RPA provides high value with minimal risk, all while expediting digital transformation. The following are some typical RPA applications in healthcare and their benefits to the organization.

Patient Scheduling

Patients can book an appointment without interaction with medical staff because of Robotic Process Automation technology. Along with reducing the requirement for allocation of resources for booking, this application can strengthen customer relations by allowing patients to schedule appointments more quickly.

Claim Management

Following the provision of a healthcare service, accounting may take some time to complete a claim due to the manual and monotonous duties involved in the medical billing process. This claims process includes recording, processing, and analyzing information and files, among other things.

The complexities of this process created a medical claims processing services industry that is now worth roughly $4.6 billion.

In addition to automating time-consuming processes, an AI healthcare claims management solution can reduce the likelihood of human mistakes during the medical billing process. That is advantageous to healthcare providers.

Compliance with Regulatory Requirements

Healthcare providers may track and record each workflow stage in organized log files using Robotic Process Automation, allowing the organization to comply with the auditing process. In addition, because bots will perform these operations, Robotic Process Automation has the potential to increase the confidentiality of data.

Data Entry, Migration, and Extraction

The healthcare sector is heavily reliant on paper-based records as most healthcare companies have divisions that significantly depend on paper documentation.

Since a portion of its dependence is on paper documents, the healthcare industry is an excellent target for digital transformation. For example, healthcare practitioners are progressively digitizing patient records to be saved electronically and made available online to other clinicians and the patients themselves to improve patient care.

Automation of obtaining data from old systems and transferring it into digital systems is possible through RPA bots. Additionally, when data migration gets required for a different goal, such as medical research, another RPA bot can take over the data migration process.

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Benefits of RPA in Healthcare

Automatic manual work is of great help in highly demanding institutions and organizations. This benefit is beneficial in the medical sector. Below are some of the benefits of Robotic Process Automation when applied in the healthcare sector.

Patient Scheduling Benefits

Appointment attendance increases because of the automation of patient scheduling and the set reminders issued by the RPA bot, which reduces the likelihood of patients forgetting their appointments. This option improves the efficiency of patient admissions.
It improves patient satisfaction. In addition to streamlining front-office help, Robotic Process Automation bots make it easier for the care management group to address patients' concerns. When used in both the front and back offices, Robotic Process Automation enables healthcare providers to provide a better customer experience.

Claim Management Benefits

Most healthcare data procedures are repetitive and rule-based. RPA helps in minimizing the possibility of human mistakes. Human intervention and the unavoidable errors resulting from manual processing get minimized when bots get used to automate these procedures. Odds are better than the mandated processes will be uniform across all departments and error-free if the bot developer creates accurate code.
It achieves a higher level of employee contentment. Assigning the workers to tiresome activities can lower employee satisfaction, resulting in higher turnover rates. Because of this, more hiring and training are required, during which personnel is less productive due to the increased workload.

Regulatory Compliance Benefits

Increased transparency is achieved through bots, which produce log information for every stage, resulting in a transparent audit trail. This benefit provides healthcare audit teams with a visible and transparent basis for compliance, which is beneficial to their work.

Data Entry, Migration, and Extraction Benefits

The price of RPA software is a tiny percentage of what healthcare institutions pay workers to accomplish manual operations, resulting in significant cost savings.

Overall Business Benefits

A more rapid transformation - Global leaders agree that Robotic Process Automation is a critical component of digital transformation.
Cost savings of a significant magnitude - Robotic Process Automation is a powerful tool for improving company KPIs throughout sectors and across the globe.
Increased adaptability - Robotic Process Automation robots can scale up very quickly to meet workload peaks and adapt to significant increases in demand.
A greater degree of precision - Robotic Process Automation helps to eliminate possible mistakes caused by monotonous manual work.
Compliance has improved - Robotic Process Automation has met and surpassed expectations in enhancing adherence.
Productivity has increased - Worldwide, workers believe that automation will increase their productivity.
Personnel can add more value - Executives believe that Robotic Process Automation allows staff to focus on more strategic tasks.
Employees are pleased - Robotic Process Automation promotes employee satisfaction.

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Examples of RPA Case Studies in Healthcare

Still unconvinced? Below are two real-world examples of RPA use in healthcare.

Max Healthcare Institute

Max Healthcare Institute is among the most prominent healthcare organizations in the world. Their regular work involves dealing with the data processing of patient transactions. The registration of client data, the settlement of payments, and the balancing of records for government healthcare plans are manual procedures that must streamline daily. Therefore, the Institute's top priority was to boost the effectiveness of current processes to ensure more accuracy and a decrease in processing times.

They collaborated with a Robotic Process Automation consulting business to identify sectors where they might apply robotic automation and where they could realize the greatest effect. The Institute implemented an RPA platform to improve the efficiency of the following procedures:

Processing of Claims
Data reconciliation for Central Government Health Scheme or CGHS
Compilation of information for the Ex-Contributory Servicemen's Health Scheme or ECHS

With Robotic Process Automation, Max Healthcare Institute was able to advance and surpass its struggles, including:

Minimize turnaround time by implementing RPA.
Process claims have been decreased by at least half the time.
The CGHS and ECHS have realized time savings ranging from 65 percent to 75 percent due to their implementation.

Conclusion

Healthcare is one of the essential fields and aspects of daily life. It is necessary to advance in this field as someone's life is at stake. However, the manual and monotonous data input can be very time-consuming and cause inefficiencies, further damaging.

One great way of minimizing this risk is through automation. Time and accuracy are essential in this field, and with Robotic Process Automation, you will avoid inefficiencies, but it will also free up time for the healthcare workers.

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