Intelligent process automation is a driving force for efficiency. Using automation inside of a hospital would not only make it run smoother but the employees and patients alike would be able to reap significant benefits from it.

This post will go over some use cases for automation inside healthcare facilities and how it can save the industry time, money, and resources, all while improving the quality of care that many patients receive.

Read on to learn more!

Intelligent process automation (IPA) has been discussed and broken down numerous times in our blog posts, but for newcomers, here’s a quick overview.

IPA uses software bots to take over the mundane and repetitive tasks that come with day-to-day work so that employees can spend more time on complex tasks or interact with customers.

The US Government Accountability Office claims that 10-50% of tasks inside a given business could be automated, and many predictions say that the global IPA industry has surpassed a worth of more than $5 billion.

IPA helps stakeholders by streamlining workflows, but automation inside the healthcare industry is still not that widespread.

This is mainly due to factors like logistics challenges, initial deployment challenges, cost, and hesitancy from the higher-ups. However, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t areas in the healthcare field that can be expanded upon with IPA.

Patients can receive better quality care and have more access to it. Healthcare workers can tend to more critical tasks and services can be streamlined while funds are allocated to other important areas.

Although this list is not that long, here are six ways that IPA can be used inside a hospital to improve efficiency and create solutions in the industry.

Health data can come from a lot of different places like third-party portals, insurance companies, appointment schedulers, and more. Many countries don’t have centralized healthcare, so it would be really hard to streamline all the health data into one source.

IPA can reduce the number of mundane admin tasks by processing patient records. There have been estimates that say the healthcare industry spends more than $2 billion on poorly executed manual data management that is full of errors. This exact reason is why IPA solutions are useful since they can increase the accuracy and efficiency of this data entry.

IPA can also help with ensuring that online data sharing is following the right privacy protocols, regulating the correct access rights, and more. These solutions also introduce fast detection and response times if there is ever a security breach. Simply put, IPA can help strengthen a hospital’s cybersecurity, and this can be very attractive to employees.

This process is similar to record keeping in the realm of IPA. Although they are easy to set up over the phone, scheduling appointments still takes up time for healthcare workers. Because this process is so simple, it can easily be taken over by IPA solutions.

For example, IPA could increase the efficiency of an appointment scheduler by reading incoming data and creating appointments based on data regarding symptoms, diagnoses, availability of healthcare workers, and more. This would give healthcare workers a lot more time to focus on other things, and it would likely increase overall patient satisfaction.

There is also a “going-green” aspect to automating appointment schedulers. Instead of hospitals printing out physical papers for patients, the data can now be stored online. This means that patients can access it whenever they want while minimizing the amount of paper that is being used.

We’ve talked about how IPA can streamline workflows, but it can also streamline health payments, process different service costs for tests, medications, and more, and also the doctor’s fee into one cohesive and easy-to-read bill. The accuracy of these processed bills saves time for healthcare workers and can prevent any issues with the bill.

IPA can also send reminders to patients if there are any issues or delays with their payment.

You can also use IPA to process health claims. These claims usually take healthcare workers up to 2 minutes to process, but an IPA solution can process them in 12 seconds. When you calculate it out, one IPA bot could do the processing work of nearly 10 employees without making an error.

Additionally, almost a quarter of claims are denied due to internal errors. Each claim costs about $120, so an IPA solution would be able to reduce a healthcare facility’s financial losses. This is already being seen in US hospitals where IPA solutions are being used to check for missing information inside of these health claims.

Since the start of the pandemic, assets like defibrillators, ventilators, and medical pumps have become crucial for the survival of some patients. When equipment is lost, healthcare workers must spend time searching for them, and this keeps them from tending to the more important things. It has been estimated that healthcare workers spend more than 5500 hours a month searching for lost equipment.

Furthermore, if this equipment is not found, then patients receive less quality care they need, resulting in longer wait times and delays in treatment.

IPA solutions can also be combined with digital sensors and cloud-based control panels so that assets can be located by employees. They can also check equipment inventories to make sure they’re accurate, and they can monitor the conditions of the assets to make sure they are working properly.

It’s no surprise that healthcare workers collect immense amounts of data every day. The issue is that a lot of this data never gets looked over.

IPA solutions can analyze all this data and give healthcare workers insight and analytics into each individual patient. With these levels of insight and analytics, healthcare workers can improve the patient’s experience with improved treatments and diagnostics.

Additionally, IPA can be used in telehealth services that have grown so much through the pandemic. They can process online screenings and diagnostics, aiding health services that have been stretched so thin over the past few years.

When a patient is discharged, it’s important that they are still receiving the proper care at home. IPA can be used to make sure that patients recover properly.

For example, IPA solutions could send reminders to patients about when they should take medications or follow a specific diet.

Additionally, IPA could motivate patients to take certain measurements of things like their blood pressure or heart rate, and the solution could notify a healthcare professional if something is wrong. Simply put, IPA solutions could be a quick communication channel between healthcare workers at a hospital and patients at home. This will in turn boost the patient’s experience, allow for at-home recovery, and keep hospital beds empty for those that need them the most.

Healthcare facilities should take IPA solutions into consideration because they can open doors to higher quality healthcare while boosting the patient experience. These solutions can help with new forms of revenue streams as they work their way into something valuable as medical processes are automated.

IPA is driven by automation, analytics, and AI. Healthcare facilities should harness their privacy and data credibility while sharpening their skills to push for more healthcare IPA.

To learn more about IPA or to see if your healthcare facility is ready to automate, get in contact with Digital Workforce Solutions today!