The need for greater efficiency and accuracy in healthcare operations is driving an increasing number of organizations to explore healthcare automation. And interest is rising fast—Statista found that the current $11 billion artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare market would grow to $188 billion by 2030.
If you’re wondering whether automation can solve some of your organization’s operational challenges, you’re in the right place. Below is a thorough list of healthcare automation resources that will help you understand the concept better, including an explanation of what healthcare automation is and the multitudes of ways it can be—and has been—used.
If you have any questions after reading, don’t hesitate to reach out to us here at Nividous and ask! We’d love to help.
What is healthcare automation?
Healthcare automation refers to the application of technology (software) to complete various business tasks in the healthcare industry with the goal of achieving adaptive, high-quality patient care. Healthcare organizations can deploy individual types of automation—like robotic process automation (RPA)—to automate small tasks. There are many other technologies that are also useful for automating tasks that are normally completed by a human employee. Tools like business process management (BPM), artificial intelligence (AI), and intelligent document processing (IDP) are often used for this purpose. Combining these tools in various ways can allow end-to-end automation of large workflows.
Some benefits of automation are obvious, like saving time and relieving healthcare professionals of the burden of handling menial tasks. Today, professionals can even work side-by-side with automation to accomplish more creative, human-focused tasks with greater speed. And healthcare companies can enjoy more benefits still by automating key administrative processes, handling tasks like prior authorizations and clinical trial data analysis with greater accuracy than before.
Learn more about companies that have used automation and AI in healthcare by reading these pieces:
Automation In Healthcare: Achieving Operational Efficiency At Scale
Artificial Intelligence In Healthcare: Applications And Benefits
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Healthcare automation is frequently applied to back-office tasks that are typically handled by the finance, HR, and IT departments. It can also be applied to clinical tasks, although these patient-related processes are less friendly to automation. In most cases, clinical tasks can be partially automated with specialized tools like electronic health record systems (EHRs) or electronic medical record systems (EMRs). Below are six of the most common applications of automation in healthcare.
Revenue Cycle Management
Revenue cycle management is an area ripe for automation because data entry errors, data silos, and other process snafus can affect payment timing and accuracy. While healthcare companies sometimes use advanced electronic health records (EHR) or electronic medical records (EMR) systems to manage their data, even those systems can’t communicate with every other application needed to run the company’s payment workflows. Revenue departments thus can end up with islands of relevant data stored in different applications.
In contrast, the best automation tools have the versatility to work with every type of application and bring data together in one place, which is useful for not only streamlining the process but also for analyzing payment trends and patterns that can help you improve your revenue processes even further.
Read the following article and case study to learn more about how you can employ intelligent automation to seamlessly manage the entire process, orchestrating the activities of bots, doctors, and administrative staff:
Automating Revenue Cycle Management For Healthcare Providers
AEG Vision Revolutionizes its Complete Revenue Cycle Management with Nividous RPA Bots
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Watch this on-demand webinar to discover how Intelligent Automation can help improve coding accuracy, streamline clinical documentation, and effectively manage compliance risks.
Medical Coding Automation
Bots save time and code around the clock, unlike human employees. They are also able to keep up with the large and rapidly changing rules and regulations, which allows them to code faster and more accurately than humans. In all cases, bots can catch mistakes and coding intricacies that people simply cannot—even those who are trained in medical coding.
Learn more about having an RPA bot complete your unique coding processes with all their modifiers and variations:
Medical Coding Automation: An Introduction For Administrators
Automated Prior Authorization and Eligibility Checks For Insurance
Distinct, user-unfriendly insurance portals and complicated insurance regulations make prior authorizations a time-consuming task. Using automation bots, your organization can achieve authorization more accurately and quickly, freeing up your medical providers and administrators to offer better care.
Learn how you can automate the prior authorization process with RPA to achieve quicker authorization and avoid costly insurance errors:
Automated Prior Authorization: How To Upgrade And Streamline Health Insurance Approvals
Invoice Processing Using RPA
Invoice and claims processing—also called accounts receivable and accounts payable (AR and AP)—can be stymied by similar issues as prior authorization. Whether your payments are delayed by disparate insurance company processes or by human error in filling out claims information, AR and AP automation can help by processing quicker and more accurately.
Learn more about what it looks like to automate this process with RPA bots and AI to reduce human error and get paid faster:
Artificial Intelligence In Medical Billing: An Introduction
Enhance Invoice Processing Using RPA
RPA In Clinical Trials
Clinical trials are all-important scientific endeavors that can lead to lifesaving discoveries, but the extensive amount of data tends to hinder timely progress. RPA bots can be used in this area to automate patient selection, implement the automated scheduling of healthcare, and even cull data as doctors observe study results.
Read more about how RPA is used in real clinical trials to save time and support patient health:
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) In Clinical Trials: How Does It Help?
Onboarding Automation
The best healthcare depends on knowledgeable, dedicated employees who know your systems inside and out. Applying automation to your onboarding processes can help get new employees up to speed faster, give them access to data sooner, and encourage them to familiarize themselves with your existing systems instead of filling out paperwork.
Read more about how intelligent document processing (IDP) and RPA bots can help your new employees get up to speed:
A Comprehensive Guide to Onboarding Automation
However you choose to apply healthcare automation, it can save your company time, ease pressure on your care providers, and even improve your bottom line.
Nividous is dedicated to building custom intelligent automation solutions for our clients, including healthcare organizations. We understand the needs of healthcare providers and administrators and have experience designing automation systems that help your workers provide better patient care.
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