Robotic Process Automation and Its Role in Healthcare

“Welcome to the IVRS service of XYZ. For English press 1…”

Does that sound familiar?

We are very familiar with such Interactive Voice Response services and have acknowledged their queries too. These systems employ robots to guide us, answer our typical standard queries, accept key tones of voice response, and pass it on to the underlying applications for a better service. A similar instance is the “Hello. How may I help you?” chatbots you’ve interacted with on the web. That makes you nothing new to the concept of Robotic Process Automation (RPA). 

Then is this making such a fuss out now in the tech world? 

Well, it’s probably because industries are becoming more aware of its benefits and are employing it for driving profits. With a market value expected to reach USD 43.52 billion by 2029, RPA is increasingly being adopted by businesses of all kinds in an effort to increase Return on Investment (ROI) and boost productivity by minimizing human efforts. 

Before we proceed further, let’s quickly brush over the basics. 

As per the definition, “Robotic Process Automation is the term used for software tools that partially or fully automate human activities which are manual, repetitive and rule-based.” RPA is used to automate repetitive human activities and is ultimately trying to take humans out of the scene. These work by replicating the actions of an actual human interacting with one or more software applications to perform tasks like data entry, sorting customer queries, processing standard transactions, etc.

Benefits of RPA  

• Reduction in expenditure

While discussing the benefits that RPA brings, it is needless to mention the trimmed expenses it offers. When work is automated it just doesn’t accelerate the work but also ensures getting things done round the clock. 

• Increased Efficiency and Accuracy  

To err is human and no offense, even the most careful person can make mistakes. We get way too bored with the dull repetitive tasks that result in errors. With RPA, work can be performed error-free leading to increased efficiency. Associated with high-quality work comes the advantage of accuracy and high satisfaction rates.

• Decreased cycle time and increased speed and throughput 

Automating the work results in higher speed. Consider a human worker doing a task like data entry, if we assume it takes 5 min for him to complete his task, by automating we can trim down that time to seconds.

• Scalability and Flexibility

RPA can be scaled up or down as per the requirement. Alright, let me explain it with an example. Most businesses face a boom-and-bust time, so do you think it would be practical to hire people during prosperity and send them off when it is not??

RPA can be used to handle such situations, during peak time it can handle the excess work, and when the market turns sour scale it back.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) opens up new possibilities for businesses to automate processes from an end-to-end perspective by completely eliminating human involvement and making the process more sound, efficient, and less error-prone.

RPA In Healthcare Industry

Wouldn’t it be amazing if we can bring the above-listed advantages into the healthcare field? Well before that let’s try to figure out the issues healthcare is facing right now.

One of the primary challenges they face is in managing and processing information from clinical applications, lab information systems, radiology information systems, and HR applications. Most healthcare organizations still rely on humans to perform these repetitive tasks to process information. Automating these tasks would undoubtedly transform the industry. But the documents that we consider here must not be structured necessarily, there can be documents that don’t follow a particular pattern, which would make processing even more complex. So how do we apply robotic process automation here?

Forms for product registration, purchase, or service subscription (surveys, banking forms, etc.) are typical business papers that follow a format. In order to define and apply rules for where to seek certain bits of information, these forms adhere to certain generic layout patterns. These structured documents have a predetermined geometric region (template) for each piece of data, making them “theoretically” simpler to work with when using document recognition software like OBR (bar code recognition) for document separation, identification, or sorting, as well as standard OCR or OMR (checkmark recognition).

Even semi-structured documents, like invoices or delivery notes, respond to particular styles, like headers or footers, where the most frequent information to extract is typically located. Even the table listing the purchased products (table line items) is typically put in a location that is simpler to configure. Unstructured document difficulties, however, are somewhat intricate. There is no pattern, and we are unable to use pre-made templates. The required application of applied linguistics, advanced image, text, and document recognition, as well as specific fault tolerance features, adds a new layer of complexity to the process of digital transformation.

Paperwork and documentation hinder even the most advanced healthcare facilities. There is a larger set of tasks that come repeated when a hospital environment is considered. A modern workflow capable of automating recurring tasks would expedite the way healthcare industries work. 

Conclusion

By integrating RPA, everyday organizational operations can easily be automated to not only upgrade businesses but also to save effort and time for more important tasks. There is no doubt that IoT, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are already significant components of many different sectors. By integrating RPA each domain can gain even more traction in terms of efficiency. Have a project in mind that includes RPA? Collaborate with us to make your dreams a reality. Click here.