Healthcare providers continue to face unprecedented challenges. Even before COVID-19 added a new level of complexity, shortages of healthcare professionals, rising costs, outdated management systems and an ageing population were already straining the NHS and its international peers.
Given the new normality, if we are to ensure our medical care is fit for the future, we need to make best possible use of all available resources to increase the speed and efficiency of clinical processes. With the backlog of primary care and outpatient referrals growing week by week, it’s self-evident that this is imperative.
There is only one practical solution, and that is to leverage the power of technology to tackle productivity drains within the healthcare system. Top of the list should be the countless, repetitive, manual, non-clinical back office and management tasks.
Given that over a third of these could be easily automated, according to McKinsey Quarterly, removing these from the equation presents an obvious and considerable productivity opportunity.
One of the most effective technology for addressing this is Robotic Process Automation (RPA). An amalgam of artificial intelligence, robotics and business process automation, RPA is platform-independent, so it has the capacity to automate both new and existing legacy IT infrastructures.
This means RPA can overcome interoperability issues by bridging the gaps between different systems, so information can be extracted as needed from any one of them.
Healthcare RPA also helps ensure that what could be critical information isn’t channelled into silos where it’s hidden from the view of clinicians. As electronic medical records (EMR) are not yet universally available, this is of real practical significance as it moves us on from simply thinking about managing data, to how it is used to create knowledge.
And because healthcare RPA software pulls together data from different systems into a single point of reference, clinicians don’t have to move between multiple interfaces to get the information they require.
There are many potential applications for RPA in healthcare. For instance, the auto-indexing and filing of scanned documents into patient folders; reconciling DICOM images against a Master Patient Index before archiving; the automatic collection of data from patients; and the scheduling of appointments based on a clinician’s availability. The list goes on.
And from the patient’s perspective, RPA can make their interaction with the health service and the clinicians looking after them a faster, less fragmented experience. Whether that’s making and changing appointments, obtaining faster test results, or better management of medication and ongoing treatment plans, linking and integrating the service provision results in more personalised and effective healthcare.
And since software bots perform to precise, pre-set workflows, RPA reduces the potential for error and the costs that go with it, and they can do this around the clock, without a drop-off in efficiency or quality. In other words, RPA has the potential not only to cut operating costs by streamlining workflows but also to ensure greater compliance, which in turn feeds through into higher levels of patient satisfaction.
Introducing RPA offers many benefits under normal circumstances, but during periods of severe stress, it has game-changing potential. Imagine if much of the administrative burden was immediately and simply removed from high volume COVID-19 testing with RPA bots entering test results. How many resources might that free up?
Introducing RPA into a healthcare organisation is surprisingly straightforward. So, while healthcare entities might presume that introducing new technology is going to be disruptive, difficult and costly, in reality implementing an RPA programme is, in most cases, a simple process, since it requires no heavy investment in additional IT systems.
Hyland, for instance, through its recent acquisition of the leading German software firm, Another Monday, has been able to add robotic process automation to its OnBase platform, giving our healthcare customers an end-to-end solution with zero integration costs.
In the future, this is a technology that can be enriched further using facial recognition and biometric technology to give, for instance, an even more automated patient check-in and EPR retrieval process that leads to shorter waiting times. It can also be combined with other digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence, blockchain and big data analytics as part of a broader digital transformation that’s now so necessary in healthcare.
Because as long as our healthcare system remains too heavily dependent on paper and manual tasks, it will become increasingly unable to meet the needs of the demographically-drive rise in patient numbers, let alone at a time when the entire world is struggling to deal with COVID—19.
However, the full benefits from ‘front of house’ services such as video visits, telemedicine and remote monitoring can only be enjoyed when behind the scenes technologies, such as RPA, are used to ensure greater interoperability of systems and improve access and speed of transfer and exchange of patient data between those who need it.
Peter Corscadden is Install Base Manager EMEA with Hyland Healthcare. www.hyland.com