RPA in healthcare: use cases, benefits & challenges

Verifying the eligibility of health insurance is a process that hospitals have to deal with daily, and as the number of patients grows, it becomes increasingly labor-intensive. However, RPA bots can streamline this tedious, rule-based process.

For instance, they can extract patient data (name, insurance ID, etc.) from multiple repositories and internal systems (such as CRM or EHR) to help insurance verification specialists work more efficiently. Also, a bot can generate an email to an insurance company and send it automatically to verify the patient’s coverage and benefits.

Upon discharge, patients need to fill prescriptions and follow discharge instructions. Ensuring that the patient follows post-discharge guidelines is a critical yet cumbersome task for healthcare providers. 

RPA robots can help patients follow discharge guidelines by sending notifications via emails or messengers and reminding them about upcoming appointments and prescriptions to pick up. This approach to post-discharge management can help a hospital provide better patient care and improve patient satisfaction.

Healthcare organizations can also apply RPA to carry out compliance-related tasks. For example, bots can extract electronic protected health information (ePHI) from documents, create copies of this data, and store it in a secure data repository to help an organization comply with HIPAA data backup requirements. Additionally, bots can scan patient records to inspect those containing duplicate or incomplete data and flag such records for risk and compliance teams. This way, bots help organizations correct data errors timely and increase their readiness for HIPAA audits.

Many hospitals adopt RPA-enabled self-service kiosks to improve in-hospital check-in, an important patient service aspect. Upon arrival, people can input their information into a self-service kiosk, while RPA bots can capture and transmit this data into patient registration software, thus automating the registration process. 

With more sophisticated AI-powered automation solutions, healthcare organizations can also perform basic patient triage. This way, front-desk employees receive a list of patients organized by priority, significantly reducing check-in times.

Clinicians heavily rely on medical records in making decisions. However, hospitals still struggle to keep data updated across all healthcare systems and departments, and manual data transfer between different applications leaves room for mistakes and data breaches.

For example, lab employees usually transfer medical test results from a laboratory information management system (LIMS) to a patient’s profile by hand. Instead, an RPA bot can automatically extract the results from LIMS and put them into any other system. The application of RPA ensures 100% accuracy of the transferred information, decreases data breach risks, frees employees from mundane work, and keeps patient records synced and updated.

RPA bots can also be programmed to collect and integrate patient data across an organization (including medical histories, laboratory test results, or radiology reports), helping healthcare professionals make more accurate diagnoses and offer individual treatment for each patient.

Due to the continuous personnel shortage in the healthcare industry, efficient management of the existing health workforce has become critical to organizations’ performance. Luckily, a healthcare organization can enhance human resource management by adopting RPA.

For instance, RPA bots can synchronize data across all staff-related systems to help human resource specialists calculate performance, payroll, full-time equivalent (FTE), and other related metrics more easily. This way, the implementation of RPA helps human resource managers inspect talent gaps, ensure correct and timely payments to employees, and manage medical staff’s workload more efficiently.

Healthcare providers handle numerous bills and payments on a daily basis, including those for doctor visits, tests, medicines, hospital stays, etc. RPA bots can aggregate various data types, such as disease codes, prescriptions, and information from medical records, all from different sources, to help healthcare providers speed up billing and payments and prevent errors.

Nurses can spend a lot of time searching for needed hospital equipment, especially when it’s misplaced, which can cause disruptions and delays in treatment delivery.

Hospitals can combine RPA software and digital sensors to help staff locate devices, check inventory, and monitor equipment conditions. Now, if an employee needs to find a specific asset, they can leave a request via a corporate web portal. An RPA bot processes the request and checks the availability of the asset across medicine or equipment storage facilities. If the asset is available, the bot can notify the appropriate medical equipment manager to transfer the asset to the employee.

A similar RPA-based tracking strategy can be applied to locating organs intended for transplantation, allowing for more precise surgery planning and better care for transplant patients.

Streamlining and accelerating the patient onboarding process with RPA is one of the ways healthcare institutions can reduce stress and increase the satisfaction of their patients.

For example, bots can aggregate data shared by patients through digital forms, chats, or emails and use it to generate electronic patient records automatically. This way, patients won’t have to wait for the medical staff to create and fill out such records when visiting a hospital.