Robotic automation in healthcare can help cut costs by 50%

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Imagine you're operating as a healthcare supplier who has to compile and handle vast knowledge from across the administration and employees. The processes are long and repetitive, so you decide to reduce the mundane tasks and use technology. Technology is able to cut back errors, get the correct knowledge, compile the information, analyse it, and do all the repetitive tasks. In exchange, you get time to truly work on strategising and providing higher aid to patients. Being a provider of the healthcare business, the goal is to produce prime quality and accessible medical services to the population at scale. This is where robotic automation comes into the image. What is Robotic Process Automation, what are the advantages of using it, and what are tasks that would be left to RPA? Take a look

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What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA):
RPA is that the use of code with computing and Machine Learning (ML) capabilities to handle a high volume and repetitive task that antecedently needed humans to perform, eg calculations, keeping records, and generating reports.

RPA code permits users to form robots or bots that may perform a repetitive task unceasingly. As a healthcare analyst, you simply ought to teach the automaton how the tasks are to be performed, the bot mimics it and executes the method inexhaustibly. RPA is simply sort of a digital employee, who helps in polishing off the mundane task, with most potency, effectiveness, and security.

Tasks performed by RPA
The healthcare business has seen a surge in digital adoption to boost its potency. The tasks that are set to induce machine-controlled with RPA adoption are as follows:

Appointment Scheduling: RPA helps in giving personalised expertise by gathering relevant medical knowledge needed from the patient, to line a meeting. Robots may also facilitate setting timely reminders concerning the appointment.
Automate the billing process: Being a long task that involves loads of calculations and evaluations of various bills throughout the patient's time at the hospital, can be machine-controlled by using robots. Robots facilitate precise calculations, minimising errors, and reducing the billing time which can sometimes otherwise go into hours.
Insurance claim management: RPA provides knowledge from multiple systems and helps enable an error-free claim process. Right from making the claim, filtering the information, and paying the applicant, the machine-controlled method helps in reducing the time by about 80 percent.
Inventory and supply chain management: Keeping a record of daily use things like gloves, needles, syringes, medicines, or PPE (personal protection equipment) kits may be an uninteresting task. These tasks of record-keeping and stock notifying can be machine-controlled and will also facilitate saving costs.
Optimised regulatory compliance: RPA follows a stepwise approach that helps the processes to be tracked, traced, documented, and systemised in well-structured logs. This helps in handling audits and considerations by healthcare regulators.
Support large-scale implementation of health plans: RPA will facilitate in collating the info from clinical trials, recording population health, facilitate in analysing knowledge records to support the aid business.

 
Benefits of using RPA
As a healthcare supplier, the main task is to produce quality service to the patient and specialise in strategising plans to provide patients with the most effective quality of service. RPA helps hospitals like never before by automating monotonous tasks. The results achieved are as follows:

1. RPA helps in eliminating several internal errors and creates sleeker, faster, and fewer manually intensive workflows
2. Robots facilitate in expeditiously responding to patient requests, which helps in enhancing the progress for both the patient and also the doctor
3. Gives patients one-point access to their health information profiles
4. Enables cross-platform fast information access to healthcare professionals
5. Helps in planning appointments and making timely reminders, which improves patient satisfaction
6. Helps in reducing claim process value by 75 percent by automating 80 percent of the process
7. Helps in delivering up to 47 percent of overall savings by reducing the process prices
8. Helps with an alternative to paper records, that in an exceedingly approach helps the environment.
   
   

Future of RPA
With the surge in Covid-19 cases and challenges in maintaining the businesses in tough times, 90 percent of the big organisations globally have adopted RPA in several forms.

The future of RPA in healthcare can open new doors to produce higher patient care. New entrepreneurs can revolutionise the healthcare domain. These are a couple of startups that are attempting to supply RPA solutions to the healthcare industry:

FeatSystems: FeatSystems is a Mumbai-based RPA startup that helps send timely notifications to patients about their appointments. It offers features like widget amalgamation and medical datum management.
EnterBridge: A US-based RPA startup aims to automate the insurance claim process. With RPA, they aim to meet transparency and provide hassle-free claim settlements.
T-impact: A British startup that assists doctors during surgeries by providing key instructions and warnings.
Computing System Innovation: An American startup that automates the process of medical data structuring by using Intellidact, a software that offers automation to repetitive processes like data entry, etc.
CloudMedx: A US-based startup that makes use of predictive analytics techniques to provide warning and care to patients. The use of techniques like Natural Language Processing (NLP), big data, and machine learning (ML) help medical researchers as well as doctors pay close attention to patients and provide personalised care.

The day is not far when health will be accessible and qualitative for everyone with RPA and other technologies helping healthcare practitioners from all facets of society, we are moving towards a better technologically resilient and efficient future.

The article has been contributed by Aniket Narkar, PGDM Healthcare 2020-22, S.P. Mandali’s Welingkar Institute of Management. He recently won at the Maharashtra Health Hackathon 2021 - MH². Her group presented the idea of ‘Vital Kare’ a sturdy, portable and sustainable kit to maintain optimum temperature of neonate during transport. 

[This article has been reproduced with permission from Welingkar Institute of Management Development and Research (WeSchool)]