UiPath: Using automation to combat the pandemic
Jason Warrelmann, Global Director of Healthcare and Life Sciences at UiPath, explains how RPA is helping healthcare providers through Covid-19 and beyond
Jason Warrelmann, Global Director of Healthcare and Life Sciences at UiPath, explains how RPA is helping healthcare providers through Covid-19 and beyond
Robotic process automation (RPA) was a very new business concept in 2005 when UiPath started. Industries like manufacturing, retail and banking were quick to identify automation as a new technology they could leverage in actuarial and supply chain processes.
On the provider health side, there was very little automation as most organizations were going through large, costly EMR transformations. However, in healthcare services and business process outsourcing (BPO), automation or "screen scraping” was being introduced to handle back office processes like claim status reporting from web portals and basic data entry. In health insurance organizations, automation had a bigger role with basic claim adjudication and data aggregation for reporting.
Over time, automation has evolved significantly due to advancements in screen element recognition, robot management and cognitive skills (for instance computer vision and machine learning).
Automation in the provider segment has accelerated considerably over the last two years. Automating revenue cycle management to lower days in accounts receivable, as well as improving overhead costs, are common use cases. In the last year, we have seen a larger interest in reducing physician burnout and improving patient quality through clinical workflow automation.
Health plans are more mature, and organizations have started automating more than 45% of operational processes to keep cost per claim low and member experience high. Health IT organizations are now looking at automation platforms like UiPath to reduce their dependency on hard scripted python, CCL and macro-based workflows to reduce technical debt and total cost of ownership.
Throughout the pandemic, UiPath has helped resolve issues specific to the Covid-19 like helping to analyze and disseminate test results, saving valuable time. Some other ways the software has been helping healthcare providers during the crisis include:
Aside from Covid, a hospital in Europe leveraged UiPath to digitally transform their primarily paper-based systems containing medical files, financial documents, and more. Recognizing they needed a more efficient way to manage 70,000 emergency visits and 300,000 outpatients annually, the hospital turned to automation to eliminate internal functional silos and create more efficient and less-manual workflows and activities.
Not only did automation allow healthcare professionals to spend less time on back-end processes and more time with patients, but it also gave patients a unified online platform to access all of their medical information (history, billing information, appointment scheduling, reminders, etc.), which improved patient satisfaction, appointment turnout and payment timeliness.
RPA is already evolving into a more intelligent space, which will continue to grow into a new wave of transformation approaches and, ultimately, change the way healthcare works. Here are some examples: