From rapid diagnosis to robot-assisted surgeries, the transformation of automation and AI in healthcare is fast-tracking patient care by minimizing human interventions.
Artificial intelligence eases the lives of patients, doctors, Payers, and hospital administrators by executing tasks that were typically done by humans manually but in less time and at a lesser cost. Also, trends like Homecare, telehealth, and chat therapy are also growing at a pace all across the healthcare industry. As per statistics, Homecare/Healthcare market is expected to grow at the compounded annual growth rate of 4.67% during the forecast period 2022-2027.
Truly, AI is reinventing and revivifying modern healthcare through ML that can predict, comprehend, learn and act smarter. The prime objective of this entire automation or AI game is to free healthcare professionals from being ‘overburdened’ to ‘ever happy.’
Healthcare Challenges and Opportunities
The healthcare industry of today is overburdened by high costs, incredibly high volume, and stringent regulations. These pressures can challenge the quality and urgency of patient care. The drive to reduce costs is countered by the need to continuously improve the patient experience and meet regulations that often require onerous paperwork and reporting. In healthcare organizations, many repetitive processes and decisions rely on the availability of accurate data. Automating these process with RPA and AI can not only reduce reliance on manual efforts but also helps in ac
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Patient onboarding and follow-ups
Patient onboarding includes a series of tasks that must be completed by scheduling staff and the intake coordinator before a patient visits the doctor. These steps include insurance eligibility verification, doctor availability, EHR record management and updating information in the healthcare database. Manually performing these steps might lead to errors and delays in offering quality patient care. But, RPA bots make the patient onboarding process efficient by autonomously accessing patient IDs and searching in the database for insurance eligibility verification and scheduling patients as per doctors’ availability. Also, if in any situation, a doctor is unavailable, RPA bots update the patient with details and follow the further course of action. RPA benefits don’t stop here; after a patient visit, RPA bots keep tracking the patient’s health and follow up with them and generate a notification for a doctor visit, medical tests, and other purposes.
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Medical billing and claims processing
Medical billing processes are not performed or reliant on a single entity. It involves every step of association between patients and healthcare organizations. From the pre-registration process to the completion of the patient visit, medical billing is a comprehensive assessment. This process involves the patient’s insurance plan, copay options, insurance eligibility and coverage options, generation of medical code and payment reimbursement. Automation solutions like RPA bots can keep track record of all the data required for the medical billing process. Bots can extract data from multiple touchpoints, identify and resolve areas that require attention, and merge all caregiver activities for higher reimbursement and greater patient experience.
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Generating reports for physicians
Medical report generation for physicians or healthcare professionals is a tedious process due to the involvement of a huge volume of data. Collecting data from multiple sources and aggregating them together is a lot on the healthcare staff’s part. This health re[prt must be in sync considering the latest and past healthcare reports. RPA can keep track of all the data shared by patients during doctor visits, and bots can extract these data together. Once data extraction is done, RPA bots collectively add the data to the particular patient records and share them effortlessly when required by physicians.
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Prescription management
Managing prescriptions include monitoring, reconciling medications and ensuring patients get their desired outcomes. With the high volume of patient visits and multiple patient requirements, fulfilling all requirements manually is a mammoth task for healthcare professionals. Automating the prescription management process helps healthcare staff on keeping track of whether medications prescribed to patients are taken properly for desired healthcare outcomes. Using RPA, healthcare staff make sure the necessary medicines that are prescribed to patients are in enough amounts, so there is no chance of poor quality care.
Also, in this league, the home-based care sector with therapists, social workers, and healthcare professionals are now able to serve safely, happily, and scientifically, eliminating the pile of Paperwork and manual database maintenance tasks. Gone are those days when a standard Doctor’s chamber would have data entry operators with a mountain of patient charts, registration notebooks, and unmapped patient history files.
Healthcare Automation Benefits
- With the advancing technology, Care at home has been made quite popular and user friendly, with Robots or smart Phone applications doing the job of “Custom to Commission” on behalf of the administration staff. From searching for local physicians, booking and tracking appointments – making payments – scheduling visits for consultation, and most importantly, Data security at ease at home – all is done and Sorted 24/7.
- Healthcare Providers are using Robotic Process Automation to reduce costs, increase process efficiency, and improve the patient care experience, and some of the challenges in healthcare can also be mitigated with Robotic Process Automation like Administrative data entry: The document digitization process: Managing and scheduling patient appointments: Billing and processing: Records management: Customer service and remote care.
- Software “chat Bots” are another extension of the automation sphere, which can be “triggered” to perform tasks based on various parameters. In some larger platforms, Bots are even used in prospective care – which means scheduling physician’s appointments and maintaining post-visit records along with billing and payment model integrations. It’s just a couple of clicks and Bots instruction-based model which simplifies patient care even more. These “Bots” can be programmed using various commercially viable tools so that they can take over thousands of detailed, repetitive tasks and processes, making everyone in the healthcare system—patients, partners, caregivers, administrators, and communities—feel a whole lot at ease.
- Innumerable factors go into running a successful medical practice. One of those is revenue cycle management RCM Although the main aim of RCM is to accelerate provider revenue, it delivers other benefits as well. These serve not only the providers but also the patients, giving revenue management even greater value. By implementing RCM, healthcare providers can efficiently identify the gaps.
This decreases the likelihood of misaims, denials, and overclaims at times since about 90% of these errors are due to easily preventable technical issues, like missing information in the patient’s chart or improper coding. This directly impacts patients’ insurance claims, too, as healthcare payers are in the same league of data inaccuracy often. When these errors are mitigated, and claims are approved after their first submission, providers smoothly receive their reimbursements. Also, they don’t have to incur extra money for Sherlock and appeal denied claims.
Conclusion
A survey conducted to understand the healthcare payer market size, shares, trends, and analysis stated that the global payer healthcare market is forecast to reach $111.9 billion by 2030, and the Healthcare players are redefining their role to deliver higher value-based care while they adapt to adopt the new age technology driven automated non-human-driven solutions. Let’s get Automated; it’s high time!