Administrative difficulties in the healthcare industry have long hampered production and increased costs. Furthermore, big technology deployments that typically take months or years to complete limit the ability of health systems to quickly change their workflows, systems, and processes to serve the most important goals.

Moreover, with the increasing significance of data analytics, artificial intelligence, and workflow automation, healthcare organizations are turning to CIOs and CDOs as change agents.

But with so many things to consider, how can CIOs set up their infrastructure to accomplish short-term, transitory goals while encouraging long-term results or continuous projects?

The solution lies in Intelligent Automation. Intelligent Automation combines two advanced technologies i.e., Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Cognitive Automation to provide enormous scalability and configurability to health systems. This is why CIOs are embracing Intelligent Automation for health systems of all sizes to drive short- and long-term digital transformation in support of important strategic goals across the care continuum.

In fact according to a report from Gartner, by 2023, half of US healthcare providers would devote resources to deploying robotic process automation (RPA). RPA platforms are currently used by only 5-10% of the healthcare industry.

The global healthcare sector, which still faces tough problems from wait lists for medical procedures, lack of skilled workers, and an aging population, is heavily reliant on process automation and RPA.

For healthcare professionals, reducing inefficiencies in the administration of therapies is of utmost importance. They must deal with anything from scheduling appointments to sharing patient data among apps, from shortening wait times to more effectively handling financial applications.

Practically everywhere you turn in the healthcare industry, there are opportunities to streamline manual and redundant procedures and, most importantly, give healthcare workers more time to devote to patient care.

1. Financial Management:

Healthcare providers may make sure they effectively manage their revenue cycle by controlling everything from authorization to coding and remittance. With the aid of a digital workforce, they can empower their teams to recover the cost of care and remove the uncertainty surrounding payment responsibility and eligibility.

2. Appointment management and patient scheduling:

The management of patient scheduling and appointments is one of the time-consuming tasks for healthcare providers. To confirm appointments, modify appointments, and update patient record systems, patients can now use self-service booking systems and individualized multi-channel communications, freeing up staff members to deliver front-line treatment

3. Medical claims automation and claims management:

Intelligent automation allows healthcare providers to handle thousands of claims in hours as opposed to weeks, shorten the claim handling process, help patients and doctors when they need it, and lower the number of unpaid claims. Data reentry errors can be eliminated by using digital employees to automatically manage communications between various stakeholders in the claims management process. Additionally, this approach offers a platform that is simple to upgrade in pace with shifting government regulations.

4. Migration, data entry, and data management

Whether it’s onboarding new employees or moving patient records, digital workers create the ideal solution to the time-consuming and resource-hungry job involved in data entry, migration, and maintenance. This helps teams go paperless by freeing important individuals from the constraints of administrative duties, such as printing, scanning, and reentering data.

5. Automation of the healthcare supply chain:

Hospitals frequently oversee hundreds of deliveries each day to maintain the efficiency of their hectic operations. Hospitals can employ digital workers to check orders against agreed delivery dates with suppliers, log deliveries, alert departments when goods arrive, maintain real-time records of what is in store, and automatically replenish things before they run out with intelligent automation.

6. Billing processing

A variety of invoice forms can be used to provide products to hospitals and other clinical organizations, and these invoices are often monitored manually from the moment of payment delivery. The information from bills may now be read, converted, and uploaded in system suitable data formats by businesses using intelligent automation in conjunction with optical character recognition. This information can then be automatically sent throughout the organization.

7. Onboarding of Patients:

Healthcare providers are increasingly embracing intelligent automation to expedite patient onboarding because going to the hospital can be stressful for patients. This includes compiling the patient’s medical, demographic, and insurance data, deciding on the administrators’ and medical staff’s next courses of action, and producing or updating computerized patient records.

8. Regulatory Compliance:

The healthcare industry’s regulatory landscape is always changing and evolving, imposing new duties on providers in the areas of data security and privacy, documenting medical procedures, and auditing them. Providers may make sure they have reliable and modern processes in place to prove compliance by using intelligent automation.

9. Tracking COVID-19 test runs:

Healthcare providers had to enhance services when the pandemic struck to handle the unexpectedly high demand. They have overcome the issue of processing tests and delivering results to their relevant populations using a digital workforce, lowering error rates and accelerating crucial services.

10. Patient Interaction:

Globally, elective surgeries have been greatly impacted by the COVID-19 crisis. Healthcare providers are automating the entire process of determining outstanding procedures and then communicating the appropriate information to outpatients via SMS and email using digital workers. This gives patients peace of mind that their procedure is still in progress and saves administrative staff thousands of hours each year.

Start with a high volume repetitive rule-based process when determining where automation can be used. More than just cost savings are realized as a result of offloading these repetitive and routine tasks from humans to software robots. Healthcare executives and CIOs are becoming more and more aware of RPA’s value-added proposition. Employees can focus their energy on more important tasks by being relieved of tedious, boring daily tasks, which can transform business operations and enhance the customer experience.