Integrated Robotic Process Automation – The Fastest Growing Trend in Healthcare Technology

Posted on behalf of Tori Buck, Director of Product Management 
RPA (Robotics Process Automation) has been getting a lot of hype over the past two years. Gartner indicates it’s the fastest growing software category, and it seems every industry has taken to looking at ways to benefit from it in some way. Given the amount of attention the Healthcare industry has been getting with regards to rising costs, and the need for better patient outcomes, it seems logical that healthcare would be a prime candidate to benefit.
Everywhere you look you see signs of a troubled healthcare enterprise either with hospitals closing due to rising costs, concerns over provider burnout due to EMR documentation practices, or even errors happening when employees are backlogged with paperwork to be processed. All of these contribute to issues that can ultimately affect how patient care can be provided in a safe, effective, and cost-conscious way.
While automation has been in use within healthcare enterprises for quite some time, the improvements made to this technology have been substantial over the years. We have moved from simple script automations that help in one-time bulk data loads, to looking at integrated automations which benefit from designed decision making using if-then scenarios, and screen reading techniques to improve accuracy. More departments are benefiting by empowering their employees to think efficiently with automating mundane tasks to do more high impact and value-added work.
With Summit Healthcare’s automation platform, we have been helping hospitals streamline tasks and save money for over 20 years. Hospital systems such as Halifax Health have been able to scale its RPA usage to save on a wide range of daily tasks from finance to administration. This frees up over 37 hours/day for its staff and creates a large cost savings between reduction in errors and faster turnaround on tasks.
Another huge success was seen at Silver Cross Hospital, where deactivating accounts within its Cerner EMR would have taken 1.5 hours per account just to validate and ensure there was no associated documentation that would need to be maintained for over 10,000 accounts. This was then able to be scheduled for regular maintenance of pre-account cleanup and reduce the workload of staff by up to 2 hours per day. Again, a huge time savings for the staff and allowing them to focus on higher value tasks.
With the power of Summit’s integration platform, you have the added benefit of completely integrated RPA. You can take advantage of the many streams of data already flowing within your network and use it to streamline more than just efficiencies between disparate systems. Tasks can be triggered automatically by patient events using an interfaced data feed, provider decisions made within the EMR, or even payer inquiries for documentation to validate claims. You can quickly minimize the effort being required by staff so they can focus on what makes your hospital a center of excellence and trust for patient care.
Is your hospital in need of a refocus on excellence? Find out how Summit Healthcare can help you achieve that goal with RPA.