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Robotic Process Automation has delivered and continues to deliver a very healthy ROI for brands Strong business leaders who are looking beyond cost reduction are leveraging RPA as part of the Digital transformation effort – freeing up valued human capital and realigning them to new tasks with the highest business value, which often enables new consumer-facing business models.
My research has shown RPA is the largest recipient of healthcare budgetary allocation for this year and counting, in the emerging technology class.
S. Ernest Paul
Let’s face it – Healthcare organizations accumulate patient data at a rapid pace daily. With affordable Cloud storage availability, the rapid emergence of new technology, processing speed, tools, software, and a soon 5G speed implementation, RPA is a prime candidate in healthcare to gain on process efficiencies providing a partial solution for a larger Digital Transformation effort within Pharma, Life Sciences, Hospitals and Health Systems
Gains, efficiencies and consumer trust can be achieved from RPA initiatives resulting in budgetary shifts with employees aligned to focus on critical digital customer-facing initiatives firmly placing the customer at the center.
Key forward thinking digital hires, customer facing digital properties and key marketing technology personalization initiatives have to provide a concerted and impactful effort to plug customer retention leakage and reignite LTV
Fresh digital and omnichannel engagement initiatives with redirected capital from RPA driven savings just makes sense. The NPS scores and lower acquisition rates need immediate attention. RPA initiatives running parallel provides this assuring equilibrium.
Fig: Revenue and efficiency opportunities to discover trends and key insights
Legislative background
With the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 and The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009 was an ambitious policy effort to increase the adoption of electronic health records (EHRs).
THE HITECH Act was enacted, prompted by evidence that the use of EHRs could substantially improve the quality and efficiency of care delivered. We are now soon heading into 2020 and the good news is that adults with health insurance is +20 million since 2010 according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
The current Financial health of Hospitals and Health systems
This improved access to healthcare juxtaposed with an aging baby boomer population with increased healthcare needs and medical care has burdened hospitals and health systems financially. Data suggests greater than 50% of hospital and health systems revenue is from their market investments than from their core business of healthcare, a troubling sign. According to Deloitte, between 51 and 60% of hospitals could see negative margins by 2025 if they are unable to achieve productivity targets.
What are Health systems, hospitals, and others doing to get ahead of the curve
There are multiple concerted efforts by Pharma, Life sciences, Health systems and Hospitals to harness data to spawn new ventures, explore and partner with adjacent ecosystems. Some are seeking to consolidate with other health systems and hospitals and leverage economies of scale.
The one standout knight in the playbook is RPA, traditionally outsourced can now be brought in-house or used as RPA as a Service from Beyondiris Consulting.
Key Area of Opportunity is Productivity utilizing RPA
RPA in its nascent form are software programs or ‘bots’ that can perform repetitive and mundane tasks with accuracy, speed, and compliance – a digital workforce of sorts, following predetermined rules mechanically performing business tasks. Once these clerical type tasks are automated workers can allocate their business intellect and acumen and direct them towards accomplishing activities requiring human touch and knowledge.
What can RPA do?
This digital workforce of ‘bots’ can be tasked via software such as ‘UI Path’, ‘Automation Anywhere’ or ‘Blue Prism’ to open and send emails, login into web applications, input data into forms, extract data from multiple internal data stores, scrape data and follow if this- then that (think of IFFT) type functionality and deliver or email a report. Viola!
Fig: The PDCA RPA Recommended Process Model for Continuous Improvement
Design thinking led Patient-Centric Use cases for RPA in Healthcare
1. Billing and Claims – These time-consuming administrative tasks can be accomplished utilizing RPA driven ‘bots’. 30% – 40% of claims can be denied due to non-compliance with regulations. The necessary authorizations and paperwork required by healthcare providers to treat and care for patients can be delegated to ‘bots’ eliminating any delays, errors or miscommunication, so the patient/consumer experience is not hindered, interrupted or compromised.
2. Patient and transactional data – Life science and Healthcare organizations can delegate ‘bot’s to translate, format and input data instead, streamlining and layering compliance with new defenses. These activities performed via RPA would relieve employees to train their attention on tasks that deliver on the patient experience, quality, key consumer insights and building upon the NPS score.
3. Clinician Notes delivered via speech to text – Built into the new clinician-patient interaction process, an emphasis on maintaining eye contact with the patient is key. It conveys attentiveness – perpetuating an emphasis on patient empathy – a critical value from the patient’s lens. Instead of note-taking, the clinician would switch to audio-recording the patient’s condition, drug usage, vital statistics typically entered manually into the patient’s EHR. In this new interactive process, Natural language processing (NLP) would translate the conversation into text and format it directly into the EHR database via RPA ‘bots’.
4. Simplification of Patient appointment scheduling – Appointments that are typically scheduled online often encounter scheduling conflicts with different doctors and different hospitals. Cancellations and doctor unavailability lead to tedious and testy phone calls to all parties involved. With RPA – let the ‘bots’ optimally schedule appointments according to the diagnosis, doctor availability, location, and other key criteria. The RPA system would scan the patient data and pass it on to a ‘referral management representative’ to book the appointment. Furthermore, the ‘bot’ can automatically notify the patient if the doctor is running behind or perhaps caught up in an emergency. The RPA software would continually cross-reference the doctor’s schedule and alert the patient if the need arises alleviating the ‘wait’ anxiety. It is a winner. Remember the Patient is at the center of the wheel.
5. Implementation of discharge instructions – Upon discharge, patients have to follow discharge guidelines, including expectant compliance which may include medications, follow up appointments or an inadvertent adverse reaction from a post-op procedure. Following up on patient compliance can be shifted to an RPA driven process. RPA driven cognitive-behavioral nudges in the form of encouraging incentivized mobile reminders enhances the patient’s experience, compliance leading to a reduction in re-admissions.
Fig: Recommended RPA initiatives consensus-driven decision model for governance and compliance
Regulatory compliance, efficiency, optimization, and revenue opportunity Use Cases
6. Recording audit procedures for risk assessment – Healthcare is a regulated industry with multiple tasks and processes which have to be followed up by reports generated for verification, approvals, patient safety and maintaining the quality of services. All these are necessary components of regulatory compliance and can at times result in unintended errors. With RPA – audits can be optimized by RPA including the recording of data, sharing, approvals, and generation of reports meant for multiple entities. RPA can also detect and inform on any non-compliance and violations.
7. Optimizing and improving the healthcare cycle – The voluminous data collected by healthcare organizations includes key diagnosis insights and treatment cycles. This data is the new oil when layered with data science & analytics. Remarkable trends and brand-new insights plus new revenue opportunities can be derived and have resulted in success. Mature and data-savvy organizations have been able to harvest new revenue streams, some spawning profitable ventures, and startups.
NOTABLE STANDOUT IN THE HOSPITAL SPACE – Setting the pace
The Mayo Clinic is one institution with 300+ AI driven projects with diversified revenue streams from ventures. Resulting success has allowed them to explore, diversify and dip into adjacent ecosystems and are early adopters with a ‘Usain Bolt’ like stride
8. Population health, remote monitoring & utilization management – There is a great demand for data scientists and universities are gearing up with new graduate programs. This wealth of data which exists, unfortunately, cannot be leveraged by RPA alone. RPA is efficient with structured data only. The Unstructured data which exists in systems like Epic and EHR is massaged with data science statistical modeling and promising results are fed into machine learning systems layered with AI. This lane is wide open for opportunities.
Fig: Open EHR Specification Components Block Diagram
The Future of Healthcare with Innovation and Digital Transformation
The Chief Medical Officer and his/her team are best matched and partner with the Data Science team to constantly explore and test scores of Clinical use cases often resulting in new utilization optimization gold. Payers, Pharma, and Life Sciences are leading the charge with armies of data scientists testing new clinical hypotheses daily, often succeeding in striking virgin oilfields.
Prediction - A Chief Data Strategy Officer + Chief Medical Officer TEAM
A new congruence of likely alliances shall emerge to deliver value
My prediction is that a newly created position of a Chief Data Strategy Officer would likely emerge and tag team with the Chief Medical Officer and his/her team to lead the charge within this relatively uncharted continent. There is a lot of runway in this space and it is just getting started.
The maturity of Cognitive computing, at present, somewhat restrained by Quantum computing lag – when at near maturity should give rise to a V10 muscle car with a 0-100 mph in mere nanoseconds firing simulated human thought processes in a computerized model. Nascar nor the Grand Prix shall ever be the same.
Self-learning algorithms, data mining, pattern recognition with semantic NLP gushing unstructured interoperable EHR data blended with personalization shall flourish. Consider a reality with structured customer data illuminated with luminescent strings of hundreds of personas compared to the 5-10 at best, marketing automation teams fuel consumer engagement with, today.
Would this not be the very Shangri-la of nudge driven marketing orchestrated with masterful accuracy and precision of just the product you had wished for – a perfect selection, paired with an accompaniment you just could not do without, executed, purchased and delivered with a mere head nod.
Oh, what a utopian consumer experience. Pure couture design thinking at its cognitive best.
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Have you wondered why you can never delete the Health App from the iPhone?
Do #getoutofthecube with me. Meet me at [email protected] . Feel the urge to just say Hello. Just do it. 336.287.1085
I live in Avon, Connecticut. I blog on Digital Strategy topics on Digitalbrine and am a Staff writer for ‘Data-Driven Investor’ on Medium.
