How do you stop staff having to re-key information? How do you deal with repetitive back-office tasks? How can you move information from one system to another when there is ‘no way of integrating’? Welcome to Robotic Process Automation or RPA. In essence, this is software that has been programmed to simulate users. When used in the right circumstances, it can be astonishingly effective. A client of ours used to spend ca 10 minutes per patient copying and pasting details – such as medical history and treatment dates – and moving attachments from one system into another system. With psLINK, the job was handed to a software robot. The results? Saving 2 FTE admin employees, improved speed, data quality and happier staff – staff that could now focus on engaging with patients, not mindless repetitive tasks.
Another example of automation is where the robot is programmed to open and read incoming emails. Our Advanced Triage & Referral solution can now open referrals sent via email, convert all scanned documents into machine readable text using OCR (optical character recognition) and then apply sophisticated triage rules to decide the appropriate pathway. The result? Significant saving of staff time and faster, more consistent decisions.
Robotic Process Automation can’t deliver more front-line staff or an empathetic voice on the phone or in person, but it can generate admin savings to ensure more time is spent with patients and less time on re-keying or other repetitive manual tasks – for these jobs the robots cost a fraction, deliver high quality at speed, 24 hours a day.
So where could we help you automate processes?
- Moving referrals or other data in and out of systems where conventional wisdom would suggest that ‘integration is not possible’
- Extracting data from existing case management or PAS systems to check where a patient is in the pathway and then in triggering email or SMS alerts
- Extracting data from multiple systems to create a data set for MI or SLA reporting
Contact us for a discussion on RPA today.