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The Pandemic Put Healthcare Systems and Workers Under Enormous Pressures
This industry has traditionally been constrained in how rapidly it can adopt new technologies.
However, with the spotlight cast upon it through the last few years, it is now racing to embrace new technologies. Technologies that will help accelerate workflows and business processes, reduce manual tasks, and ultimately improve patient care. This is critically important because all this is happening at a time when there is a healthcare worker shortage.
According to the American Hospital Association, there will be a shortage of 3.2 million healthcare workers by 2026.
Ultimately, every health system needs their clinicians practicing at the top of their license, not tied to their desk sifting through administrative paperwork.
Challenges in Healthcare
Challenges in healthcare demand new strategies to overcome them. Healthcare providers are being asked to do more with less amid tremendous complexity. With the proliferation of investments in Electronic Health Records (EHR) and other technologies, administrators and clinical teams are being inundated with dashboards and reports. Despite having all the information, they are often forced to make crucial operational decisions without complete insight. The good news is that help is not far away. As outlined in the recent “AWS Industry Solutions Report – 4Q ‘21” healthcare providers can drive rapid outcomes through intelligent automation and use of digital workers.
However, without insights and understanding about which business challenges are top of mind for how work is done today, automation teams risk missing opportunities for overall process improvement and resulting revenue gains. This stretches out the time between assessment and successful automation.
Let us unpack one story of a current Blue Prism customer serving the health care industry and how they are using the process assessment capability.
Who:
A leading global advisory services practice chartered with driving transformative, sustainable improvements to health institutions in over 40 countries, including 5 leading health care systems in the U.S. The practice is already using Blue Prism to automate repetitive and compliance focused processes like clinical billing and is successfully returning thousands of hours of staff time.
Challenge:
Facing ever-increasing complexity, this organization’s automation Center of Excellence (CoE) wanted to expand intelligent automation to other high value areas such as supply chain, claims processing, revenue cycle management, and digitizing the patient journey.
Processes included denial management, eligibility verification, medical coding optimization and auditing, patient account management, charge capture, billing & prior authorization, and many more. With a strong need to first discover the “as-is” process, the CoE business analysts had been interviewing physicians and nurses to help walk through all the details and try to find exceptions. However, this undertaking was slow and inaccurate, taking months to completely document the processes and facing the challenge of accuracy inherent in manual user interviews.
Further, the increased complexity and requirements gathering process across thousands of clinicians and administrative staff made it difficult to know what to automate next with the highest return. Also, they lacked the staff needed to do the assessment properly.
Solution:
The CoE decided to adopt Blue Prism Process Intelligence to perform a process assessment. This allowed them to use event logs and desktop screen captures of workflow to automate the discovery of all existing processes and tasks. Their business analysts were able to see and understand the “as is” processes and associated deviations. The business analysts were able to validate their findings by presenting these process flows and guides to the clinicians. Data-driven AI analysis showed where the automation potential was greatest in the form of ROI measures. The resulting conversations enabled a shift that helps define a solution in days, instead of wasting weeks and months collecting data manually.
Results:
It was estimated that operating costs can be reduced as much as 11-15% leveraging the information derived from the process assessment. Observations from the process assessment:
• Pre-built templates and ELT tools helped quickly ingest data into the Analysis engine including from SAP, ServiceNow, and specialty tools like EHR (EPIC, Cerner)
• AI drove the data-driven analysis of system processes and user-driven tasks
• Process Definition Documents (PDDs), wireframe and process skeletons diagrams created with time savings of more than 30%.
• Existing processes could be documented in days instead of months. This helped avoid taking clinicians away from their primary job of providing care.
• Decision makers could review ROI recommendations to allocate automation funding.
Learn More!
Learn how to assemble your Blue Prism intelligent automation solutions on AWS in the AWS Industry Solutions Report (4Q 2021) here.