Why Should Healthcare Providers Choose Automated Patient Scheduling?

The Covid-19 outbreak has magnified some of the patient scheduling challenges in healthcare delivery systems such as Electronic Health Records(EHR), long wait times, delayed patient appointments, overworked frontline staff, and lack of skilled labor. And patient scheduling is one of the key challenges that is still prevailing in the healthcare industry. Also, after Covid 19 outbreak patients have become accustomed to virtual care, and dealing with digital records, that’s making it compulsory for the healthcare provider to churn out the patient scheduling challenges and offer value patient care.

In our previous blog, we discussed the growing adoption of RPA in Healthcare and how it can help healthcare providers in offering patient care on time. Now let’s gear up to explore more about patient scheduling challenges and how automation can help remove the hurdles and create a seamless patient experience.

What is Patient Scheduling Process in Healthcare?

Patient scheduling is the first process for healthcare providers where they can generate more revenue but with so many roadblocks in the patient scheduling process, growing higher is out of the question. Additionally, healthcare service desk staff also face challenges like-

1. Extracting data from past medical records of a patients
2. Managing many different appointment types
3. Handling referrals and associated authorizations
4. Verifying insurance eligibility before scheduling an appointment
5. Adjusting appointment schedules as per patient preference and doctors availability
6. Issuing appointment status to patients and doctors on time

Considering the amount of work involved in the patient scheduling process, it is no surprise that healthcare providers are moving to automation solutions and AI technologies both out of necessity and in response to customer preference.

As per Gartner, around 85% of healthcare providers are going to increase or sustain hyperautomation investment strategies in the coming years. Using the hyperautomation approach and automation in healthcare work as a helping hand for healthcare staff in scheduling appointments and a lot more.

How Automation Helps Healthcare Staff in Patient Scheduling?

Automated patient scheduling and registration processes can be performed by both attended and unattended bots as per the healthcare provider’s preferences. Unlike the traditional methods, automated patient scheduling uses bots to perform all the processes without any extra manual effort. These bots can be integrated into the healthcare system and when invoked these bots can perform several actions.

• Bots can get patient details autonomously from the patient ID, and their medical records, check their earlier visits
  Further, these bots can search the patient ID in the healthcare database
• If patient ID is not available in the healthcare database, it easily schedules a patient appointment as per the patient preference and doctor availability and notifies the patient and doctor
• And if the patient ID is already found in the hospital healthcare database, it checks the insurance eligibility, verifies the details, updates the appointment details in the patient ID, and notifies the user and doctors

See how automated patient scheduling looks simple and fast with RPA. Leveraging AI bots kick the manual effort out of the patient scheduling process and give healthcare staff the focus to work on a patient-centric process.

[Also Read:What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in Healthcare? Use Cases, Benefits, and Challenges in 2023]

Benefits of Automated Patient Scheduling

1. Interoperability and Data Processing
   Unlike the traditional method of patient data collection, AI bots are capable of navigating between multiple departments across the healthcare organization. Healthcare providers can program these bots in a way that they can navigate between your appointment scheduling software, EHR system, EMR, and payer portals to verify the document and share data in the respective application or to other application software. Healthcare providers can also use unattended bots for registration and scheduling for 24/7 days which means AI bots will perform tasks even when there are no front-office tasks available.
2. Accurate Patient Scheduling Management
   Do you know missed appointments can also contribute to attrition and poor healthcare outcomes? What if we say it costs millions to healthcare providers? Many clinicians and healthcare providers still use manual efforts to book an appointment and make appointment changes in case a patient doesn’t show up. Also, some other common tasks like administrative details, patient insurance, medical history, diagnosis, treatment, and other reports need to be added to the database. AI bot can perform all these processes without any manual intervention using an electronic health record system that can easily be accessed by patients and clinicians. This whole automated process not only saves the patient time but also allows the healthcare provider to collect data, analyze it and offer outstanding patient care.
3. Self-Scheduling Experience
   Being a healthcare provider, every organization strives to create a difference in the patient care experience. And automation is the opportunity to make that difference by leveraging RPA and AI bots with EHR management. It’s a poor use of everyone’s time for a patient to fill out a form in the office and wait for the treatment. Instead of this time-consuming method, healthcare providers can create self-scheduling options for patients with bots where a patient can autonomously book their appointment through bots and connect with healthcare professionals for early diagnosis and treatment. To make it more effective, healthcare providers can use these bots for sharing healthcare records and data directly to patient IDs for easy knowledge sharing.
4. Regulatory & Compliance
   While booking an appointment, patients often share their personal and some other confidential details. With a large amount of data sharing, it is a must to keep the data secure to safeguard sensitive information. Healthcare providers can program these bots by state and federal healthcare compliance and regulatory laws and also maintain the log of users accessing the data and providing reports if any breaches occurred.

The digital era is here for healthcare and being a healthcare provider if you are looking forward to reducing cost, enhancing the patient experience, and giving employee relief from manual work then automation is the staircase to drive the optimum healthcare experience. So let automation take over the repetitive process and healthcare staff enhance the patient care experience with automated patient scheduling.