Why Robotic Process Automation Has Uniquely Equipped the Healthcare Industry to Start to Tackle the Global Pandemic

Efficiency is always a healthcare necessity. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it became a more urgent situation for healthcare industry systems across the country.

With each new surge in cases, hospitals have been stretched to capacity. More patients mean more paperwork for medical workers, who are already exhausted and stressed. Time spent manually entering data keeps them away from where they’re really needed on the hospital floor: Artificial intelligence can’t treat patients.

For our large healthcare customer, passing those repetitive tasks to RPA technology freed up medical professionals and took at least one strain off their shoulders. It also demonstrated that RPA had the potential to improve efficiencies not just in the back office, but in clinical settings.

Another example of RPA in Healthcare is in the COVID-19 vaccine rollouts. One state required the healthcare organization to register every single vaccine dose — hundreds of thousands. At the time, it didn’t have any technology that could do this automatically, which would have meant the burden would have been on medical staff to manually log every dose. In the early days of vaccine distribution, in particular, people were needed to give vaccines, not enter them into a computer.

Using RPA, the automation team created rules that had the software upload this data, instead of a human. This freed up healthcare workers for more important tasks and saved the organization hundreds of thousands of dollars in labor costs.

Emergency situations turn workable flaws into critical issues. They also reveal the strengths and importance of technology, not because it can replace people, but because it gives them the chance to meet the moment the best they can.

The Future of RPA in Healthcare or Healthcare Process Automation

Two healthcare-specific areas that are primed for RPA interventions:

1. Patient-facing systems: The pandemic accelerated digital transformation in healthcare and moved more interactions between patients and healthcare systems online. The patient journey involves multiple legacy systems, all of which present obstacles that could be smoothed out with RPA.

2. Insurance codes: Healthcare involves a complex system of codes that are used by medical professionals and insurance companies to bill for procedures. Applying RPA to this system would free people up from memorizing codes, enabling them to work on higher-level tasks.

The benefits of RPA in back office and frontline healthcare have gone through a trial by fire during COVID-19. Expansion of the technology in healthcare has demonstrated cost savings and increased efficiency. It’s clear that as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning progress, there will be many more opportunities for this technology to improve lives, and even save them.

To learn more about RPA in healthcare, contact us today.