RPA in the health industry
Do you know if your customers’ insurance details and credit card details are up to date before a clinic starts? Are you fed up with manual processes slowing down clinic bookings and room rentals? Are you tired of chasing up patients for their appointments?
These are all ideal use cases for RPA, saving you time and money, ensuring bills are paid and meeting regulatory requirements. Here’s our overview of how RPA can benefit organisations in the health industry:
£1,000s per month of patient arrears avoided
Four FTE administrators
500 hours saving per month
How can healthcare organisations utilise RPA?
Accelerate administrative tasks
If you work in the healthcare sector, you’ll have first-hand knowledge of the numerous manual and time-consuming administration activities that are needed to support patient services. From booking rooms and clinics to sending out appointment reminders, it’s essential to maintain a high level of service for patients. Historically, these tasks have been done by human administrators, requiring lots of time and open to human error.
Avoid unpaid appointment fees leading to patient arrears
Furthermore, chasing up payment after a clinic can be difficult and time-consuming. If patients are unaware that their health insurance details or credit card details need updating, it can take a long time until the patient is made aware and revises their details.
For example, knee replacements are in the top ten private healthcare surgeries carried out in the UK. The average price of a knee replacement is £14,500. Imagine the scenario where a clinic replaces 100 knees in a year, and 10% of the patients don’t have up-to-date payment or insurance details before surgery; this incurs patient arrears of £145,000. Additional costs are then incurred in resolving the outstanding amount in the time taken to contact each patient, updating details manually and checking payments have been completed. This is only one scenario for one type of surgery, with most private healthcare facilities offering a suite of services and therefore potentially chalking up unpaid invoices across those treatments.
Simplify patient feedback and reporting
In order to ensure a high-quality patient experience and outcome, data needs to be captured along the patient journey, from initial assessments to discharge. Some statutory, regulatory and public reporting requirements mean certain patients need information capturing at set points, such as Patient Recorded Outcome Measures (PROMs) for hip and knee replacements. Identifying these patients early and ensuring they are tracked throughout the process is essential to meeting mandates and maintaining best practices.
How does RPA help healthcare organisations?
RPA can assist in all previously mentioned cases. By creating automated processes that pick up these simple, repetitive tasks, administrators are freed up to focus on more complex work.
These automated processes can be attended, meaning they are driven and supervised by a human resource when either a nuanced decision needs to be made or if regulations require human oversight.
Tasks that can happen in the background can be created as unattended processes, available to run out of hours, 24/7, 365 days per year. This means appointment reminders can still be sent when staff are out of office, such as during weekends and bank holidays, so that reminders are always timely. Pre-clinic checks that ensure payment details, health insurance information, and credit card expiry dates can be matched to patients ahead of clinics and any gaps can be chased up, either manually or again with an automated process. This is a double win – ensuring timely payments to avoid arrears whilst also effectively eliminating the time spent pursuing payments after clinics.
Fully automated processes
Run 24/7
365 days a year
Why invest in RPA?
There are many different ways to increase efficiency and reduce costs in the modern workplace. RPA is best placed to provide value in situations with repetitive manual tasks that have few exceptions in their workflow. This could be patient reminders, which have the same template and need to be sent at set intervals before clinics and appointments. Automating these means the exact same message can be sent at set intervals, even during non-office hours such as weekends and bank holidays because the bots can run on a pre-set schedule.
RPA can also be used when handling sensitive data such as PID, keeping it away from human operators and removing the risk of data accidentally being leaked or shared with incorrect parties. Of course, this has to be implemented in the right way and can have disastrous consequences if not set up properly. Recent instances of reputational damage in the healthcare industry include patients receiving messages with an incorrect diagnosis in place of a message of Christmas well wishes and the families of deceased persons receiving invitations for vaccine appointments.
Lastly, RPA doesn’t just have to replace existing processes. It can be used to automate cases where it’s difficult to provide enough administrator time, such as pre-checking all payment details before a clinic for every single patient. This would be very time-consuming for a human administrator and also prone to potential error if details aren’t cross-checked exactly. However, it can be done much more quickly by a bot as well as with a lower error rate as it cross-checks data precisely. Processes can also be automatically scaled up and down to handle capacity, removing bottlenecks and allowing clinical services to scale to demand.