Hospital Automation: How RPA is Improving Healthcare Operations

Think about a hospital billing clerk retyping the identical insurance and patient information in four separate systems for each claim, or nurses taking up a significant portion of their time doing scheduling and paperwork instead of tending to the patients. This is precisely the type of mundane, rules-based task for which automation is being employed in hospitals. This article gives an idea of what RPA in the healthcare industry comprise, the current status of the adoption of RPA in India, along with the challenges that lie ahead in the process of automation becoming an integral part of hospitals' operations.

What is Hospital Automation Through RPA?

The term "Robotic Process Automation" (RPA) means software bots that are programmed to interact with the existing computer systems just like human employees do, executing repetitive and rule-based activities such as data entry, scheduling, and claims management without any changes to hospital internal systems being required. The key difference between a regular robot and an RPA bot is that an RPA bot is fully virtual, operating within a hospital's existing electronic health record system, billing, and scheduling software applications.

One distinctive feature of hospital automation with RPA technologies is that RPA is based on pre-established rules and procedures. In contrast, AI technology is applied to the interpretation of unstructured data and judgement-based decision-making. Nowadays, there is a tendency to combine AI and RPA into a single process, where AI-enabled bots read documents and extract necessary clinical or billing data from unstructured text, triggering an RPA bot to perform structured actions next.

When it comes to health care organisations, this will mean using bots to manage tasks such as verifying insurance coverage, scheduling appointments, filing claims, and documenting compliance, all while running tirelessly in the background without being integrated from the outset because these processes involve different applications that are not always capable of communicating.

Where India's Adoption Currently Stands

The total robotics process automation market in India produced revenue of around USD 150-185 million in the last full year, with industry analysts forecasting growth into multiple times by the early 2030s at a compound annual growth rate of typically around 17%-30%, depending on the research organisation and methodology utilised. Within this wider market, healthcare and pharma emerge as a rapidly growing application domain, despite being a relatively smaller portion of total robotics process automation spend currently in India.

The role of government-led digital projects in India has been crucial in fostering acceptance of automation in India as a whole. More than 200 departments within the government are said to be using robotics process automation for data entry and administrative tasks. This overall drive towards digitisation has contributed to raising awareness about robotics process automation in institutions, including those in healthcare.

Workforce pressure serves as one of the drivers that are encouraging the Indian healthcare industry to automate. There is a high attrition rate among the nurses of the Indian healthcare industry, and it is expected to go up to around 30% at the end of the current fiscal year, and RPA is being seen as an answer to this problem.

The Hospital Tasks Already Being Automated

Claims management and insurance verification have become some of the most mature examples of RPA application in hospitals. In fact, according to research, automating this process is known to decrease insurance verification times by about 30 to 50%, increasing the speed of hospitals getting paid and decreasing the workload associated with manual claims processing.

The next widespread application example includes patient scheduling and appointment reminders. The use of automation helps decrease the number of missed appointments because the bots are capable of performing routine tasks such as making reminders and rescheduling patients' appointments.

Finally, clinical documentation and reporting are another application where RPA is used. With growing demands for protecting health care data, RPA bots create a reliable and auditable method for transferring and saving patient data, which cannot be achieved by manual operations.

Why Hospitals are Adopting RPA

The most immediate advantage is that of time saving on routine administrative duties performed by the hospital's staff, especially nurses. By virtue of delegating all data entry, scheduling, and claims handling responsibilities to bots, nurses will have more time available for activities which cannot be automated and demand a human touch.

Another clear advantage is the decreased risk of errors associated with manual data entry. The process of data entry into separate unconnected systems invites errors, while an RPA bot performing routine tasks in a standard manner avoids any inconsistencies and errors that may give rise to future issues.

A third advantage of RPA is that such technologies can usually be integrated with the hospital's already existing systems, without replacing the whole software system.

Where RPA Adoption Still Hits Friction

The issue of legacy system integration is the most frequently mentioned one in the industry. Hospitals continue using older software systems that have not been developed for automation purposes, and linking the bots to such systems can take much effort.

Workforce and change management are another aspect that needs to be taken into account because hospital employees may be confused about what effect automation will have on their jobs, and in order to automate processes successfully, one needs to explain to employees which particular operations will be performed by the bots.

Finally, governance is the third factor that should be taken into account due to the sensitivity of personal data involved. Bots deal with patients' information all the time, and there should be certain regulations regarding bots' management and updates to make sure that no problems are created along with solving other issues.

What it will Take for RPA to Go Mainstream

The broader expectation within industry analysis about RPA in healthcare is an expected steady growth in the application of RPA over the coming few years, especially with increasing integration of RPA and AI leading to so-called intelligent automation, in which bots not only perform structured tasks but also increasingly sophisticated unstructured tasks such as identifying relevant information from clinical documents.

Within India specifically, the combination of strain on the healthcare workforce, specifically nurse attrition, and continuing progress in digital transformation initiatives spearheaded by the Indian government is expected to continue driving automation not only as an efficient tool but also becoming more of a standard practice in terms of hospitals dealing with their workload.

What will determine whether or not hospital automation will bring any respite to India’s overstrained healthcare workforce will likely not be the level of sophistication of the automation technology itself, but the ability of the hospitals to actually implement it.

Stay tuned for more such updates on Digital Health News