How RPA is taking Healthcare Services to the Next Level

Author: Lisa Watson

Robotic Process Automation triggers to perform complex tasks with more accuracy at a faster pace than humans. Not only productivity but RPA also improves the quality and accuracy of the tasks. In healthcare, RPA can be used to do repetitive tasks such as entering blood test results of patients into specific files. They can also be used to continuously update the patient's list of a hospital. Patients will benefit a lot from automation as they are more streamlined and error-free, as a result, customer experience will improve. RPAs can help healthcare providers save a lot while increasing the quality of patient care. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) companies provide automation solutions for every industry including healthcare and can help in improving the efficiency of hospitals and other healthcare providers.

Challenges Faced by Healthcare Providers

There are a lot of challenges faced by people related to healthcare industries. Some of the challenges faced by them include rising costs, changing demographics, lack of efficiency, and better customer experience. Let us understand these problems in detail.

  • Rising Costs: Economic recession results in an increase in the cost of healthcare every year. Also, the aging population and insufficient public finding are a big challenge for both patients and healthcare providers.
  • Changing Demographics: Everyday a new disease is found and the number of patients is increasing every year. The number of staffs in the healthcare industry
is very less when compared to the number of patients. This is where RPA Solutions come into the picture. RPA bots can perform repetitive tasks better than humans, hence reducing the need for staffs.

  • Lack of Efficiency: The number of patients is increasing at a much faster rate while the number of students graduating from a medical school is decreasing. As a result, doctors have to deal with too many patients leading to bad quality treatment.

So how do RPA solutions help solve all these challenges? Let’s explore the benefits of using RPA in healthcare in details.

Use of RPA in a Hospital

While hospitals are looking for new ways to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and provide high-quality care to the patients, RPA can be beneficial in many ways including scheduling an appointment, speeding up account settlements, and improving the care cycle.

  • Scheduling an Appointment: Usually, most of the patients schedule appointments online to avoid inconvenience at the time of the visit. But, before scheduling an appointment, a hospital needs to collect personal and insurance details along with the diagnosis required. It is then aligned with the available doctors in that specific time. RPA can help in solving all the problems related to scheduling the appointments. It can book appointments based on the availability of the doctor, diagnosis, and other factors, along with informing the patients in case of unavailability of a doctor.
  • Speeding up Account Settlements: One of the most important works in a hospital is to calculate and evaluate the bills associated with each patient. Processing these bills manually requires more time and may also result in errors. RPA can calculate the bill accurately by taking all the factors like doctor’s fees, medical bills, and other facilities into account. Hospitals can increase their billing speed and decrease the error percentage by introducing RPA in their center.
  • Long-Term Implementation of Health Plans: RPA bots can track the record of a patient’s diagnosis and desired health objectives. Monitoring patients plans continuously to check to make sure they don’t deviate from the plan can cost a lot to the hospitals. But, RPA bots can easily keep a check on the patient's plan and remind them to follow the prescribed plan and is cost-effective.

Analyzing a patient’s record through data analytics increases the likelihood of accurate diagnosis. Also, manually tracking the record can be difficult for doctors who attend a lot of patients every day. RPA bots can act as a personal human assistant of the doctor.

  • Data-Driven Insights: Continous feedback provided by the automated process can help in improving the performance. Automation systems collect data about how the process is working on every cycle and use that information to improve the program. It can become more efficient after every cycle if changes are made in the program according to the feedback provided by RPA bots.

How RPA can benefit other Healthcare Providers

RPA Solutions cannot replace doctors, nurses, or pharmacists. Instead, they can do counting tasks or monitor patients list of a clinic.

RPA bots can be used in a drug store to count the medicines or to generate the bill. Doctors who run clinics need not require to appoint an assistant to manually track the appointments and the list of patients. It will also help doctors in keeping a track of the patient’s past record. It also eases the process of dealing with the growing volume of patients by allowing the doctor to focus solely on the patients instead of other paperwork.

It is better to start using RPA to complete standardized, repeatable processes in the start. Implementing RPA bots in the place of human is not only about cost savings. It is much more than that. Releasing human labors from doing boring and repetitive tasks every day can help them focus on other critical activities thereby improving customer experience.