In the healthcare sector, many manual processes and decisions depend on the precision of healthcare data. For instance, patient onboarding in the organization, follow-up appointments, reports & prescription storage, medical billing, and claims management are a few data-intensive processes in a healthcare system. Considering these factors, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can benefit the industry by increasing process efficiency; improving patient experience, reallocation of staff, and reducing costs.
The industry needs to harness this technology to improve the quality of service to patients and improve the credibility of data through automation. This article elaborates on how RPA can benefit healthcare by saving time, money, and resources.
Electronic Records
According to a whitepaper by LexisNexis, the healthcare industry spends around $2.1 billion on manual data management due to poor execution and being prone to manual errors. The health system receives the patient’s health data from various sources such as emails, paper-based forms, appointment scheduling systems, third-party portals, or insurance companies. Due to the non-centralized system of data collection, it falls under a manual task that involves a large number of repetitive actions.
RPA streamlines all these health data sources into a single in-flow and reduces the staff task to a single admin responsibility. RPA can efficiently process patient records and categorize them according to admission/recharge date, disease, age, or gender. Thus, through a robotic process solution, you can reduce the back-office staff for more accurate electronic data management.
Security Compliance
As the healthcare industry is regulated by HIPAA, healthcare systems are required to adhere to its protocols and guidelines. It is of utmost importance to maintain stringent regulations around sensitive information. i.e., patient records and data transmission. However, security compliance is majorly dependent on process precision, data accuracy, and security systems.
RPA can help healthcare organizations through electronic data sharing adhering to the security protocols of the HIPAA Act. Process automation can make permission and access rights mandatory criteria in data sharing. Also, RPA has a faster cyber-attack detection rate along with a shorter response time to tackle the issue. This will benefit the organization in avoiding security breaches, corruption, and data loss.
Billing and Payment System
Billing and payment processing are usually administrative tasks that involve repetition. With robotic processes, these tasks can be automated with bots handling appointments, follow-ups, surgeries, medicines, and other components. An accurate billing system can be put into place for auto-generated invoices that saves time for billing staff. Additionally, automated reminders can be sent to patients for processing payment to avoid payment delays.
RPA can also be beneficial to streamline payments of doctors, pharmacies, labs, and third-party service providers. Your payment system can be programmed to categorize and amalgamate the respective functions to generate simplified bills without manual interference in calculating tests, food items, medicines, workdays, and benefits.
Claim management
Most claim denials occur due to manual admin errors such as lack of documents, registration misalignment, and eligibility issues. It takes more than a minute for a human staff member to check the status of an insurance claim. However, an RPA takes only 12 seconds to respond, which is nine times faster with greater accuracy than the manual process.
RPA uses bots and AI technology to manage claims processes with quick denial communication, fast-track resubmission, and better claim amount calculation based on history. This process helps to identify the missing documents, and patient information and reduce the communication gap leading to a slow claim settlement. This will benefit healthcare organizations to manage the claims faster with reduced financial losses and mismanagement.
Summing up
Robotic process automation is gaining significant popularity in the healthcare industry due to the various other benefits as well. It has the potential to accelerate the healthcare industry with its fast-growing technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence and Internet bots. The percentage of RPA adoption in the system is increasing every year and is predicted to hike further in the next three years.
Robotic process automation can identify the current loopholes in the healthcare industry. It can breach the gap in inconsistencies, manual errors, and process limitations for better execution in the organizations consistently over time.
