Digitization in industries is redefining everything once again. It is altering the way people and businesses interact with technology. The healthcare industry is no exception. As the industry deals with ever-growing amounts of data associated with patients and other healthcare processes, the adoption of advanced digital technologies like AI, RPA, and cloud computing is on the rise.
Along with data surge and the need to process it, healthcare is also facing various problems. These include increasing healthcare costs and multiplying patients’ numbers day by day. This significantly leads to the demand for more staff and medical professionals and affects the quality of medical care.
Robotic process automation is one of the most powerful technologies in today’s world that can help address these issues. RPA can significantly lower healthcare costs and allow medical professionals to monitor their patients’ status remotely. It can also enable them to identify circumstances where the patient diverged from a given course of treatment.
Where is RPA Being Used in Healthcare?
Although flexible and easy to implement, RPA occasionally lacks the ability to automate certain aspects of process management.
Healthcare Providers successfully implemented Automation & AI.
The intelligent implementation of RPA has benefited many healthcare organizations around the world. We have compiled some of the best healthcare providers worldwide that have successfully capitalized on RPA technology.
Mid Essex Hospital Services NHS Trust
Based in the heart of Essex, Mid Essex Hospital Services NHS Trust delivers a wide range of acute and community-based services. These include A&E, emergency medical and surgery, elective surgery in most specialities, and maternity and pediatric services. To enhance its patients’ experience when arriving at the hospital, Mid Essex Hospital Services was in look for new and innovative ways. The hospital decided to implement an improved patient flow and self-service kiosk solution.
To do so, Mid Essex Hospital Services chose Intouch with Health, a Blue Prism partner. When Blue Prism provided the proven capability, the hospital became able to assess other potential benefits beyond the ability to integrate with self-service kiosks. Besides providing a comprehensive integration capability, Mid Essex Hospital Services found that Blue Prism can also save public money. “Blue Prism allows us to include older applications into our enterprise integration architecture and this means we can ‘sweat the asset’ with Blue Prism – keep our assets longer and make public money go further, which is very important to us.” -Kate Thompson, ICT Director, Mid Essex Hospital Services NHS Trust
Blue Prism delivered a powerful software platform supported by a knowledgeable and experienced professional team to Mid Essex Hospital Services NHS Trust. The project took around eight to ten weeks to complete. By implementing Blue Prism services, the hospital found that the software provides full attendance tracking rather than auditing; it allows the hospital to monitor how efficiently its patient care processes are operating.
The Health Service Executive (HSE)
HSE is the publicly funded healthcare system in Ireland. It provides acute, community and primary public health services across the country. To address the challenges of COVID-19, Ireland’s national healthcare system leveraged software robots. In 2019, the HSE’s Health Business Services (HBS) collaborated with UiPath, which provided shared services across the organisation. This has seen the introduction of RPA, led by Kevin Kelly, General Manager (Digital Innovation), HBS.
Health Business Services used RPA technology from UiPath, and the first robot was used by HBS Finance that provides accounting and payment support for the HSE. As manually done processes took about 22 hours each month, it was reduced to 2 hours using the robot software. HBS used another robot for updating the vetting status of new employees, which is a time-consuming process due to the tight regulations.
The team deployed a full-time robot assistant named Bertie, who was trained to process a large number of checks.
“Bertie [robot] can work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. He’s now actually processing as many cases in one hour than we could previously in five days, and allows us to run the update weekly instead of monthly. As a result, increasing our efficiency and enabling hiring managers to get new recruits into post sooner,” said Kevin Kelly, General Manager (Digital Innovation) at Health Business Services, HSE.
In 2020, HSE deployed another robot to assist public health staff tasked with reporting infectious diseases manually. With surging cases of COVID-19, each case must be manually entered into the system. However, the processing of each case by public health experts and observers took approximately 26 minutes. By implementing the software robot, the same task had taken three minutes and 18 seconds, giving back around 38 hours of time to staff for every 100 positive cases. Additionally, it provided more efficient and up-to-date data.
ApprioHealth
ApprioHealth is a provider of innovative IT and program services in healthcare IT, emergency response management and financial management. The company wanted a solution to reduce or remove repetitive and mundane tasks related to healthcare eligibility and claim submission. They began using RPA to implement automated processes to handle Medicaid applications and insurance reimbursement.
When they commenced, the use of APIs was still in its infancy. But over time, they found themselves querying the same websites and portals repeatedly to collect information and status updates. So, instead of deploying employees to monitor the status of applications one by one, ApprioHealth implemented RPA to automate the process.
However, technology and claims processes change over time, and it became complex to maintain those original automated processes. So, they collaborated with UiPath and AI Computer Vision. With AI Computer Vision, ApprioHealth has been able to harness the Screen OCR capability built by UiPath to automate data entry processes, capturing, and converting data from different screen images and web interfaces.
By using it, ApprioHealth was also able to increase the efficiency of RPA and handle seven times the number of claims. By standardizing on AI Computer Vision, the health organization can not only handle any form accessed through Citrix. But it can also accept data from any other VDI so the system could scale and adapt to any client need. With the help of AI Computer Vision, ApprioHealth can be able to enhance customer satisfaction and saw a 96% reduction of claims backlog.
Conclusion
The use of RPA in healthcare can benefit a lot to care providers. It will allow organizations to bring automation to complex processes at a few costs and less time. If executed intelligently, RPA will be effective in overall healthcare procedures, helping in delivering effective patient care and experience.
Reference links
https://upplabs.com/blog/rpa-robotic-process-automation-in-healthcare/
https://savvycomsoftware.com/rpa-101-applications-of-rpa-in-healthcare-industry/
https://www.blueprism.com/uploads/resources/case-studies/BluePrism-CaseStudy-Mid-Essex-NHS.pdf
https://www.uipath.com/resources/automation-case-studies/appriohealth-healthcare-rpa
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