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RPA in Healthcare – Need of the hour

Need for automation in Healthcare

A fast-changing healthcare environment is pressing the healthcare organizations to orchestrate innovative approaches and achieve high-quality, cost-effective, patient-centered care.Process efficiency wherever possible is a must for optimal patient care and profitability. This is where RPA comes in.

RPA Healthcare Industry

The benefits of implementing RPA in Healthcare are many. To cite a few of them :

  1. Saving manpower for better utilization
  1. Elimination of manual entries and errors
  1. Higher throughput
  1. Improved quality and consistency
  1. Lesser paperwork

What is RPA

Robotic Process Automation

RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is a handy and quick to implement a solution that can be implemented in healthcare industry starting from patient registration to claim settlement. Error-prone and time consuming human operations but having well-defined work-flows can be easily mimicked using RPA.Using RPA, we can log into any application, access mail, do copy-paste, extract data from different file formats and send timely reminders. As the healthcare industry is continually looking for improving efficiency and cutting costs, RPA helps in achieving these in a short span of time.

RPA in Healthcare: What are the benefits?

Outlined below are some of the existing processes that can benefit from the adoption of RPA:Admission Processes Patient admission process often go from desk to desk, taking longer wait time for patients. Automating admission processes can save time, improve the patient experience and generally enhance effective operational procedures. In typical admission process, lot of wait time can be saved if RPA is implemented.For example, out-patient registration, time between the billing and diagnostic procedure, submission of reports to doctor for diagnosis, purchase of medicine and collaborating with medical insurance companies for advance payment requires lot of manual intervention and consumes lot of time. Implementing RPA in healthcare to replace the manual process with automation will increase the accuracy and reduce the process cycle time.

Critical care and Emergency Operations

For critical care and emergency room processes, many hospitals go through overwhelming tasks as it is connected to core processes like registration, check-in and availability of physicians and specialists. If these processes are not streamlined, patients may end up waiting too long for treatment. During critical care and emergency, serving the patients in a timely manner is very crucial.

Transfers to Other Hospitals

Patients who need to be transferred may end up experiencing delays due to lack of a reliable workflow and collaboration system between hospitals, for inter-hospital referrals and transfers. Adoption of RPA in healthcare can enable hospitals to resolve this and collaborate with other hospital applications seamlessly.

Medication Processes

Medication error is a major concern for hospital administrators. Patient safety is often contingent on correct and timely administration of treatment. With several medications at their disposal, health professionals may error in the type and dosage of medication administered.RPA when used well, can reduce medication errors significantly and enhance operational efficiency by creating pre-order for patients from the doctor’s prescription entered online or through scanning.

Order of Drugs and Hospital Stationery

Hospitals should have drugs easily available; but unfortunately, that’s not usually the case. By automating supply, storage and inventory of medication, errors and drug shortages can be minimized, thereby improving patient experience. Managing the supply process manually can lead to inefficient operations and unproductive utilization of time and resources. RPA can also help in reduction of inventory by reordering automatically in a timely manner.

Patient Discharge

Another important RPA use case in healthcare could be overseeing the discharge of patients. Discharge of patients takes lot of time as it involves lot of processes like preparation of discharge summary, approval, creation of pending payment bill, return of unused drugs and stationery and final bill settlement. While bed availability and system capacity can determine patient flow, delays are often caused by process issues which involves lot of human intervention.Usage of RPA in patient discharge can help in better planning of bed availability and inpatient management.

Claim Settlement

Most of the patients are tied up with medical insurance companies. RPA can help in accelerating the claims settlement of patients by giving the appropriate patient details in a timely manner to third-party insurance companies.

Key Players in RPA

RPA Products 2018

The famous trio and the market leaders in RPA tools are Blue Prism, UiPath and Automation Anywhere. Our RPA developers who are specialized in all three tools.In addition to this, healthcare our strong point. We’ve done a lot of work for healthcare companies, and are familiar with all the processes involved. For a well-defined business use case, the implementation of RPA in healthcare processes can be completed in just a few weeks.

Ideas2IT Team

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