How can the Healthcare Industry Benefit from RPA?

by Gül Yüksel
1 year ago
532 Views

With the bone-chilling change of seasons from summer to fall, suppose that one person starts feeling sick and rushes to the nearest medical center. One doctor or nurse is summoned, only to tell our anxious person there is nothing to worry about, and only a small amount of rest is needed to get better. Now relieved, the person heads back to their home. Then another one shows up. 

From the perspective of an ordinary person, this is but a small incident in their daily life. For the healthcare worker assigned to deal with your running nose, however, after the hundredth person, this gets exhausting and meaningless. “If only,” the overworking healthcare worker sighs, “there had been an easier way.” 

 

Not to joke around with the effects of your seasonal cold, but in a typical medical center, things are way more critical that require full focus, were making a mistake can be fatal for some people. 

Essentially, all the paperwork, doctor-patient communication, and everything done by humans for humans are where most medical mistakes are made, statistically. 

How about bringing a revolution to how monotonous healthcare work is handled with no error?
  • Robotic Process Automation makes it possible.

Humans are not Robots, Do Not Expect Them To Not Get Tired

Realistically speaking, humans seek variety, so assigning them boring tasks with seemingly no end does not sound like a good weekday plan for them or a good business plan for you. Luckily, you would not hear a robot groaning about how exhausted it is feeling today. What is more, robots rarely get mental breakdowns over how much work they have to do. 

 

Sounds like a good idea, especially if you have too much information to process and categorize as you do in Healthcare with patients’ medical records and whatnot. Except for the fact that among all the costs, a robot as we traditionally know it would be such a deal breaker for most of those who are in the Industry.

 

In Robotic Process Automation, your workforce for painfully boring or time-consuming tasks consists of software, not a physical robot army. This software can do almost everything humans can do in less time, such as searching through what is worth hundreds of pages of patient medical history, and pulling out relevant information when needed. 

This way, you do not put an average human with an average attention span through confusing details, and on the receiving end, you do not keep anyone waiting for their results for up to an hour. A Win-Win situation, if you will. 

Benefits of RPA in Healthcare, Continued

Maybe we should ditch pen and paper. 

No, really, someone, even you could lose the paper on which you wrote your appointment date. After all, who is going to remember all that? If you are unlucky enough, it might even get mixed with that of someone else’s.

Two ways to look at how RPA could be beneficial to both patients and behind-the-stage healthcare workers.

Granted, RPA can save you, an ordinary person, from:

  • Counting your medication intake
  • Interacting with people more than necessary to get your diagnosis
  • Memorizing your medical appointments

And it can save healthcare workers from:

  • Preventable calculation errors, 
  • Processing payments, 
  • Scheduling your appointments,
  • Manually counting how much of a specific medication they have left in stock,
  • Reminding you what you need to remember through Auto-replies,
  • And if something goes wrong, processing complaints made against them.

All at a relatively lesser price, faster speed, and less headache to deal with. Satisfied patients, and workers who can finally take some breath.