Hospitals and medical facilities have the important task of saving lives and providing their patients with high-quality care. In a stressful field like healthcare, it is crucial to work as streamlined and efficiently as possible. And when lives are at stake, there is no room for human error or operational delays.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) enables medical institutions to transfer repetitive, manual tasks to software robots, thereby improving their efficiency, accuracy, and safety. RPA in healthcare easily automates tedious tasks, allowing you to fully focus on providing the best care to your patients. In this article, we explain how you can use RPA to address common challenges in healthcare, including managing medical records, complying with medical protocols, processing claims, and achieving optimal staffing levels.

#1. Managing Electronic Patient Records with RPA

Medical records must be accessible in many different places. Medical centers cover a wide network of departments, facilities, and partners, all of whom require access to the same medical records. Electronic patient records simplify this accessibility, but can you ensure that each record is up-to-date? RPA can be a handy solution for healthcare; keeping track of and synchronizing medical records between service providers, laboratories, pharmacies, and other parties happens with the greatest accuracy.

RPA software provides a way to interact with different systems and manage high-volume processes without further burdening your already busy staff. By integrating the various applications of your information systems, you eliminate the need for manually entering information into electronic patient records.

Should lab results be entered into a patient's medical record? Create an RPA task to retrieve the information from the laboratory system and automatically enter and synchronize it into the medical record. RPA eliminates human errors when entering data into medical records, ensuring accuracy - something that is essential when lives are at stake.

#2. Securing Medical Data with Automation

Securing electronic patient records is one of the highest priorities for organizations within healthcare. It may seem complicated to secure medical data and ensure that all processes comply with relevant medical standards, especially when using different applications in your daily work. But RPA in healthcare helps protect patient privacy and ensure compliance with regulations.

When building RPA solutions, safety should be constantly considered. By providing role-based access, RPA software robots can ensure that only authorized personnel have access to private data. Patient data often goes through many hands, but with RPA, you have full control over accessibility. After all, a doctor has different authorities than, for example, a financial department employee. Automatically keeping a detailed audit log is also an important factor within an RPA solution; this ensures that any issues or improper use can be quickly and easily identified.

#3. Streamlining Claims Handling

Processing and managing claims is one of the biggest hurdles in the world of hospital finance and administration. Hospital systems that can process claims accurately and efficiently will be financially much more stable than those that do not. Medical institutions can be confronted with enormous amounts of claims, and the process of processing these claims can require multiple applications - from claim management systems such as NDC Health's ePREMIS to health information systems such as Siemens' INVISION.

RPA can help streamline the often cumbersome, manual processes of claims handling. With automated file transfer, you can automate the daily transfer of individual damage claims (both outpatient and ambulatory) to an ftp server. Once the files are detected on the ftp server, an RPA task is initiated that combines all outpatient and ambulatory files and securely transfers them from the health information system to the claim management system.

You can also use RPA software to automate the auditing process to ensure that no claims are overlooked. An RPA solution can parse through the claims and extract identifiers and other important information. The total number of claims is then compared to the total number from a summary report. If the number of processed claims differs from the expected total, an audit report is generated for the hospital staff.

#4. Automating Processes for Optimal Staffing

Regardless of the medical institution, the healthcare providers who work there are the backbone of the entire system. Achieving optimal staffing levels to ensure the best care can be challenging. Schedules need to be coordinated to ensure that there is always sufficient staff present. At the same time, it must be ensured that the schedules are fair and balanced to prevent burnout among staff. This usually requires consulting multiple applications, such as an HR system, a time and attendance system, and a personnel database. But switching between those different applications can be time-consuming.

RPA software robots can act as a kind of "traffic cop" by automating data exchanges between those applications. This helps you keep your applications up-to-date and synchronized, so there is always sufficient staff, efficient work can be done, and patients receive the best care. Instead of worrying about staffing levels and searching for the most up-to-date information, you can focus on your patients.

With a powerful RPA solution, you can streamline the most repetitive and cumbersome processes and transform the way your hospital or healthcare institution operates. Let these software robots help relieve the pressure on your healthcare providers so that they can focus on what is truly important - keeping people healthy and saving lives.