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AI-Led Healthcare Process Automation for Medical Billing, Patient Discharge, Reporting and Other Workflows

Quick Summary: The use of AI in healthcare is no longer science fiction as the technology is rapidly transforming the healthcare industry. Now doctors can easily access and analyze patient data to make better decisions, admin staff can work efficiently and patients can have entire control of their health and well-being.

Still, most healthcare facilities and businesses find it difficult to implement AI-enabled automation in their processes. Many of them say healthcare is difficult to automate because of its unique challenges.

Let’s find out what are the issues in implementing automation in healthcare, healthcare workflows that can be automated, and the limits of healthcare automation.

Why is the healthcare industry taking time to adopt AI & automation technology?

Lower healthcare investment: Countries need to invest 1% of their GDP on healthcare- WHO reports

Healthcare facilities and clinicians are often paid by the customers, government, or insurance providers. The primary healthcare system which is at the forefront of filling the universal healthcare needs is completely dependent on the government for payment.

Thus, the healthcare resources (administrative staff and doctors) are more focused on administrative work to facilitate communication between the government and healthcare facilities rather than patient care. The primary healthcare system needs more investment to implement innovative technologies such as AI-enabled healthcare process automation for better healthcare.

Staff recruitment and training: Gap in the professional skills making it hard for the healthcare industry to fill the job and conduct technology training

Healthcare professionals go through lengthy training and licensing. That’s the reason why the healthcare industry has a huge human resource demand and supply gap. Moreover, the demand for the healthcare workforce is changing with digitization but unlike other industries, the healthcare industry is already lacking resources making it hard to provide technology training to overworked staff so that they can seamlessly work with cutting edge technologies.

Every hospital has unique needs, that may not be addressed by the generic solution

One-fits-all approach does not work in healthcare because every healthcare setting has different workflows in place. Thus, they need custom solutions to address their unique needs. For instance, there is a huge difference between hospital workflows and nursing home workflows. A genetic healthcare process automation solution does not work effectively in both cases.

Risk of AI-led automation implementation in healthcare: Software failure may lead to a much worse outcome

What if the AI system gets wrong in predicting the medication, or fails to function in the middle of procedures; what if the faulty EHR delays the emergency procedures. Ultimately the result can be much worse; one can not put human life at stake due to machine fault. Therefore, implementing technology in healthcare needs high expertise.

Digital healthcare compliance challenges: Complicated legalization, and slowly evolving policies

Digital healthcare is facing compliance, regulatory, and legalization challenges, as gouging digital means complying with the HIPAA,GDPR, and other state or federal regulations. When a healthcare setting deploys an automation solution, it must carry out a compliance audit to validate compliance readiness.

Top healthcare executives read this: EHR/EMR automation solution

Identifying the opportunities process automation in healthcare: Common implementations of workflow automation software

There are multiple areas in healthcare where AI;ed automation can work better and more quickly than humans. The goal of every healthcare provider is to identify those areas to apply the resources, intelligence, and energy in the right direction.

Below are the common healthcare processes that can be automated using workflow automation solutions.

1. Healthcare staff recruitment, onboarding, and staffing

Automation-driven healthcare recruitment, onboarding and staffing platforms for the HR department help teams to search for desired talent, simplify employee onboarding, staff scheduling, employee lifecycle management, performance metrics, human resource forecasting, skill tracking, time, and attendance management without putting in much effort and time.

2. Patient onboarding and discharge automation

The patient onboarding and discharge process include lots of approval as it often goes through the registration, billing, and insurance procedures. The traditional paper-based patient onboarding and discharge process were time-consuming making patients wait for long before admission or discharge.

With automation, the procedures of registration, billing, and insurance claims can be done in real-time and instant approval can be given for the patient admission or discharge using the mobile app.

3. Maintaining patient’s electronic health records

Patients’ health records are highly sensitive. Making manual entry to the EHR is prone to human errors and can lead to patient injury.

Automation can help to securely transfer the test result to the patient, doctor, and insurer through authentication and authorization by storing the test information on the cloud leaving no room for data breaches and errors.

4. Automating drug inventory, and supply

Hospitals must ensure the steady flow of drugs to the patient. With automation, hospitals can minimize the drug shortage. Automation helps to find expired medication in the inventory and replace it with new one, it also helps to improve the accuracy and efficiency of prescribed drug supply to the patient.

5. Medical billing automation

Automation-driven computer-assisted medical billing and coding systems can reduce the complexity of medical code diagnosis and treatment. The system leverages the EHR documents for billing health services, and an intelligent RPA platform can retrieve the data from EHR to supplement the claim form.

6. Automating patient appointment booking and follow up reminders

Automating the appointment scheduling process provides flexibility, reliability, and convenience to both customers and providers.

Allowing patients to schedule and reschedule their appointment through mobile apps or just a text message, getting pre-appointment reminders with instructions, getting appointment confirmation, and sending follow-up reminders, everything can be done by automating the patient appointment scheduling process.

Limitation of automation in healthcare

The future of healthcare is pushing us to have a more intuitive, efficient, robust, and secure digital healthcare system. Digitization of the EHR, and EMR has already changed how medical staff work, AI-driven diagnosis, and treatments are providing decision support to the radiologist, and doctors to improve care delivery.

In the upcoming years, we may see that the roles of medical staff and physicians will be drastically changing with the adoption of new technology but that doesn’t mean their role in healthcare is replaceable with RPA bots.

Though administrative job roles have major chances of elimination with automation, the system will still require human supervision.

We can automate repetitive tasks and processes but can't automate the entire healthcare system

Automation can’t fit into the bigger picture for the healthcare system. Like Tesla cars, we can’t keep our healthcare system on autopilot. Machines require human assistance to make complex decisions because only humans have that panoramic view and analytical capabilities to choose between right and wrong.

Patients want to be treated by humans and not software

Though the experts predict that more than 80% of the human interaction in healthcare can be handled with automation and AI-assisted response systems, people are still not convinced with the automated responses and seek human interaction while consulting.

As one can not put human life at stake with complete dependence on automated systems, human support is critical in healthcare.

So, we can conclude that automation is best to improve healthcare efficiencies and support everyone in the ecosystem to deliver the best but there must be humans in the loop for high-level decision making and high engagement with the patients.

Healthcare process automation: Make the technology work for you with our RPA expertise

Healthcare organizations should leverage RPA to make jobs better for the staff and physicians. Those who were previously loaded with the manual administrative job can take more valuable work and focus on patient care. The fusion of AI and RPA technology can make everyone feel more comfortable with what they do providing more space for creativity in the role.

Additionally, automation helps healthcare organizations to be cost-efficient and provides more business opportunities. The healthcare executive should look forward to automating common workflows of healthcare to drive productivity and efficiency.

If you are planning to automate healthcare processes in your organization to achieve maximum productivity, we are here to help you to get that done.

We are a healthcare-focused IT company with proven experience and expertise in healthcare software development, web, and mobile app development, consultation, designing, analysis, testing and automation.

We know every healthcare organization has a unique workflow and thus the solution must also be unique to fit your healthcare requirement. Therefore we closely evaluate your healthcare requirement before providing you with a range of solutions.

So let’s get a little proactive to make your next transformation move and feel free to discuss your plan with us.