The automation of manual tasks is an important strategy for performance improvement as the healthcare industry continually works to cut costs and improve efficiency. More than ever healthcare organizations face tough challenges in their efforts to control costs while delivering quality patient care.
While many of these challenges impact healthcare providers on a variety of fronts it is particularly true in the area of Healthcare Revenue Cycle Management. It supports healthcare providers by helping them apply process automation to many of the most labor intensive, costly and error-prone activities within Healthcare Revenue Cycle Management.
These technologies help keep healthcare providers Revenue Cycle efficient and compliant, which accelerates cash flow, reduces accounts receivables and minimizes un-collectible debt write-offs.
Functional process areas for healthcare organizations to consider for Robotic Process Automation include:
Robotic process automation is not the first options when considering the implementation in the healthcare industry, but it is a place where it has the potential for great transformation.
It is essential to streamlining back-office processes eliminating paperwork and reducing the amount of time it takes to process files. However, it goes far beyond these simple tasks. It helps healthcare providers not only reduce costs and gain efficiency but also increase the quality of patient care and the amount of time spent with patients.
Before getting into the beneficial roles of RPA in the healthcare industry, let’s first examine the challenges facing by healthcare providers today.
Challenges in the healthcare industry:
With many moving parts within the healthcare industry, i.e. Patients, doctors, insurance companies, etc., there are many challenges facing in becoming more streamlined and efficient as a whole.
Some of the biggest operational challenges faced by healthcare providers include:
- Rising Healthcare costs: Macroeconomic factors like aging populations and insufficient public funding are challenging both receivers and providers of healthcare. Health care costs are expecting to grow 6.5% worldwide through next year alone. It is essential for health care systems to work towards more streamlined processes to save money and cut health care costs.
- Lack of efficiency and customer experience: The quality of healthcare is increasingly important as patients begin to exercise their right to choose how and with whom they engage for their healthcare needs.
- Changing demographics: Healthcare is an evolving and growth-oriented field with the number of patients increasing every year. According to the Global Health and Ageing report presented by the World Health Organization (WHO), The number of people aged 65 or older is projected to grow from an estimated 524 million in 2010 to nearly 1.5 billion in 2050, with most of the developing countries. There are major concerns that staffing levels will not be able to keep up with this increase in patients. The need for more efficient and accurate processes will continue to significantly increase for healthcare providers.
With these challenges in mind, let’s explore what roles RPA plays in the healthcare system and how it can transform the healthcare industry while restoring the balance between patients and providers.
RPA as a component of healthcare:
It is used to automate processes and can also deliver a wealth of data in a continuous feedback loop that can be used for performance improvement and optimization and this systems can collect data on how the process is working and use that information to improve the program with every cycle. Over time, the system improves itself, becoming even more efficient, more accurate and more helpful to the provider’s workload.
With a growing number of people entering the healthcare system in the years to come, It is an essential tool to healthcare providers in better-streamlining processes, saving on labor costs, gaining higher efficiency, and greatly increasing the quality of patient care.
Conclusions:
Whether you are a health system, physician group, health plan, self-insured organization or even a healthcare outsourcing provider your revenue cycle operation must provide continuous margin improvement while effectively driving financial results. RPA and business process experts can help you meet these challenges and spend more time focused on providing quality patient care.
You can reach me directly at support@wonderws.com to help you with RPA.