Provider burnout has rightly been recognized as a very serious issue holding healthcare systems back from operating at their full potential. Burnout affects not only physicians, but every staff member across the healthcare continuum; from management to accounting to billing, burnout does not discriminate and can hit anyone, at any time.

The core issue behind this problem is the fact that healthcare staff simply have too much to do, and not enough time to do it. They are caught up in performing rote, monotonous, and manual tasks that eat up both time and energy. Given the fact that most of the tasks that contribute to burnout are simple in nature, robotic process automation (RPA) might offer a solution.

Challenges
As stated above, many of the tasks involved in healthcare are repetitive and monotonous. A lot of the time it is simply manual data entry, where that data could be collected in other, more efficient ways. It also hurts the business side of practices; the time taken to manually enter the necessary data leads to a great deal of lag in claims being submitted to payers, while the time taken in manually finding and retrieving data needed for reporting can lead to providers having less time to see as many patients as they otherwise might have been able to. Patients are also subjected to much of the same tedium, having to spend hours a day scheduling appointments over the phone, refilling their prescriptions or getting the information they need about upcoming medical procedures.

It is also a fact that humans performing repetitive and tedious tasks are more likely to have a lapse in concentration and make mistakes, a problem that does not affect computers.

RPA
It is important when discussing RPA, to focus not on the “robot”, but instead to focus on the people and process that will be involved. At larger scales, creating and implementing bots capable of handling these tasks can cost millions of dollars. Failure can often mean great cost, in terms of both time and money. The most common cause of failure is a lack of preparation; to avoid this problem, see our four-phase guide, below:

• Planning. In the first phase, identify the processes that are to be automated, and any logistical issues that might cause problems.
• Preliminary development. Once the processes best suited to automation have been identified, begin creating automation workflows.
• Deployment and testing. Once the automation workflows have been developed, the system is deployed. This phase is crucial, as it involves monitoring the system to identify any bugs that are present, so they may be fixed before full deployment.
• Support and maintenance. Once deployed, the system will continue to be monitored and updated to ensure it is performing at peak efficiency.