How Robotic Process Automation (RPA) accelerated healthcare collections & revenue cycle management

So far, the global pandemic has been forcing hospitals and health systems under enormous financial and operational pressures that have never been seen in our lifetimes. Regarding this, today’s healthcare organizations face difficulty in managing the volume of diverse technologies in their office and large amounts of data. As a result, revenue cycle management (RCM) & health care collections can sometimes be challenging.

Many operations managers are turning to a tried-and-true technology solution Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software, to help their healthcare firms improve their back-office operations and refresh existing RCM processes.

In this blog, let’s look at — what is RPA? How it accelerated healthcare collections & RCM in various gateways.

What is Robotic Process Automation?

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a software application that replicates many of the actions of a human-machine user to automate regular admin-related chores.

RPA In Health Care Industry– How It Works?

In health care, these RPA chatbots(programmed software robots) run on multiple backgrounds, ensuring that predictable, repetitive activities are completed without human intervention. Because revenue cycle activities span a variety of clinical and administrative systems and data storage, they frequently necessitate many human data transfer and management workflows. Robotic process automation software can take over those manual activities, allowing the revenue team to gain new advantages.

Based on a recent survey conducted by Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) study,70% of the hospitals have invested in some automation, but only 26% have invested in robotic process automation services.

According to the study, the more user tasks RPA bots could handle, the more efficient processes become, and the more time RCM staff must focus on value-added, strategic initiatives. Since the software robot, once designed and deployed, is the epitome of efficiency will be working relentlessly in the background 24*7/day/week.

Where does RPA fit in the health care workflow? — A lifesaving strategy

Let’s look at various parts of Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) that offer issues in the healthcare business, and how RPA becomes a savior for these issues:

• Reduces Costs and Improves Efficiency- Robotic process automation software automates time- and resource-intensive manual tasks to cut healthcare administration costs.
• Improves data accuracy- Reduces human error, ensures task and output consistency, and enables companies to successfully implement best practices by increasing the accuracy of data, tasks, and reporting in healthcare settings and other settings.
• Increases Staff Productivity- Improve healthcare staff productivity by automating jobs that do not require human intelligence or cognition, allowing them to focus on more complicated duties.
• Improves the patient experience- Improves the patient experience by providing more consistent treatment, which is made possible by more accurate decisions, lower costs and greater visibility across the complete patient record.

RPA in Healthcare — Use Cases

1. Simplifies Appointment Scheduling- When a pandemic like COVID-19 overwhelms staff and systems with demand for treatment, vaccines, and information, one of the more common hospital administrative tasks, appointment scheduling, can quickly become an expedition procedure.

- Here, RPA comes to the rescue- RPA software provides a tailored experience by acquiring pertinent medical data from patients to schedule an appointment. Once data collected is made available to the doctor, the appointment is scheduled, creating a separate slot in the database.

2. Automated Coding & Charge Reconciliation- Dismissals result from inaccurate or poorly coded claims, which must be examined, re-coded, and refiled, reducing revenue collection and wasting valuable staff time.

- RPA tries to reduce denied claims and increases cash flow with automated inspections of codes and charges across diverse healthcare IT systems by guaranteeing the supporting information needed by the payer is captured and added to the claim.

3. Insurance claim management — RPA helps optimize data acquired from numerous sources across many systems with 100 % accuracy for the insurance claim process. The automated claims procedure decreases average transaction times from 12 minutes to only two minutes, from filing claims to screening data to paying claimants.

Conclusion- Key Take Away

According to several healthcare industry analysts, the cost of robotic process automation may be a worry for healthcare providers who have yet to use the technology. Still, they also state that rpa in healthcare can easily surpass the expenses by fostering a culture of operational efficiency in the various departments, reducing costs, saving time, and allowing employees to focus on higher-value activities and beyond.