You want to know how automation can make this happen – patient appointment scheduling using RPA i.e. Robotic Process Automation. But before that, allow us to share with you a glaring statistic.
Based on research done by the Healthcare Information Management Systems and Society, it costs about $250 billion per year to process 30 billion healthcare transactions. Further, administrative errors account for nearly 86 percent of all errors in the healthcare industry in the US alone.
In the Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare Index, a potential savings of $177 million can be saved if electronic claim submissions are used with a potential time savings of one minute per transaction. With such data, hospitals today require a powerful automation process.
The current healthcare organization must attend to the various challenges needed to synchronize information from multiple external and internal sources of medical history, financial documents, clinical applications, laboratory systems, insurance portals, and other divergent systems.
RPA in healthcare is urgently needed to ease the problem of overburdened and overworked administrative workers. There is an urgent call to transition to superior digital technology to avert the unnecessary deluge of work, freeing the administrative team to focus on more value-added tasks.
Here’s how Robotic Automation Process (RPA) improves patient appointment scheduling.
Patient Appointment Scheduling Using RPA
The RPA bot schedules the appointments of patients based on any previous diagnosis, doctor’s availability, location, and other factors such as insurance information. It also provides up-to-date front-office support and automated data collection and processing.
In an ideal automated patient scheduling process, reminders are sent through messages and e-mails. The robot reminds patients of their appointments and optimizes patient appointments. Moreover, the bot displays the availability of doctors for patient appointments and sends out alerts when they are unavailable.
It also communicates between doctors, assistants, and other professionals about new appointments, changes to existing appointments, and cancellations with the effective management of the medical database.
Patient Registration Automation Significantly Reduces Error Rates
Based on a Harvard Medical Practice study, 70% of errors resulting in adverse events were deemed secondary to negligence, and more than 90% were considered preventable.
According to the Ponemon Institute, patient misidentification costs the average clinician nearly 30 minutes of wasted time per shift and contributes to 35% of all medical claims being denied, resulting to an estimated loss of $17.4 million per hospital per year.
With all these data, clearly shows that RPA in healthcare is necessary. Not only that but with patient registration automation, human error in the process significantly reduces.
The bot can also generate a detailed report on the medical history of each patient and sends it to the referral planning officers and doctors, thereby improving data security during transfers.
Patient Appointment Scheduling Using RPA as the Solution
RPA is the best candidate to be used to schedule patient appointments. You will receive appointments before they are added to your online medical, and the patient will receive an automated confirmation.
If patients require an appointment, they can add it manually by selecting a time that will disappear directly from your website’s online scheduling widget. You have the option to change, accept, move, or cancel these appointments.
Also Read: How Is RPA Changing the Healthcare Industry?
1. Add Your Scheduling Widget
Your patients can make appointments on any web using the simple integrative web app of online scheduling application. You simply make an appointment on the website of your clinic or health center in a matter of seconds. There is no more negotiating with patients to find a time that works for both of you, thereby, you can use your time on more valuable and important tasks.
2. Medical Appointment Calendar
You can create, configure, and schedule automated medical appointment reminders via text messages or email. You can inform doctors, assistants, and other professionals in your organization about new appointments, changes to their appointments, and appointment cancellations in minutes. Also, set appointment reminders for patients to avoid wasting doctor’s time because of patient’s non-appearance.
3. Control Your Medical Database
Your patients are automatically tracked in your database. You can include their personal information, medical history, notifications, and contact information. Patient information is automatically saved in your database system on the first appointment.
RPA implementation for patient scheduling and registration can solve many issues in this process, making patient intake easier.
4. Waiting Time Reduction
The main concern in patient scheduling and registration is the time it takes to schedule an appointment. Most patients prefer reputable hospitals and clinical groups but due to high patient volumes, the doctors do not have time to see that patient for more than a week. Many of the patients end up being rescheduled or become no-shows.
RPA bots for scheduling and registration will solve this problem by utilizing machine learning capabilities and the RPA bot’s natural language processing engines which allow patients who have been on the waitlist for too long to obtain care from their preferred healthcare provider while efficiently managing the doctor’s schedule.
5. Accurate Patient Data during Registration
Obtaining patient data during registration is critical for the Revenue Cycle Management’s (RCM) next step for billing claims and receiving payments from insurance companies. The manual registration process has hold times and delays that can last up to 20 minutes, frustrating both patients and front office staff.
RPA bots guide the patient through the process line and can quickly guide them through the registration process and verify their data using the national language generator, resulting in 100% accuracy on patients’ demographic information.
6. Data Interoperability
RPA bots are programmed to navigate between your appointment scheduling software, electronic health record (EHR), electronic medical record (EMR), payer portals, and so on in order to verify and document the obtained patient data in the designated application, which could be EHR or another scheduling software.
Unattended bots for registration and scheduling operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, which means that the RPA bots will perform these tasks even when your front office staff is unavailable or after their work hours. All these functions significantly increase patient volumes, and your hospital or health system has a better chance of increasing revenue as well.
7. Time and Money Savings
If the hospital hires more front-end operations staff, the likelihood of error and patient frustration will increase. RPA will reduce front-end operations costs and the time spent registering and scheduling one patient, as well as avoid operational costs, which can range between $50,000 and $100,000 for an average hospital or health system.
RPA bots are multitasking and interoperable, and they are also inexpensive investments as they are one-time expenses with a much faster return on investment than hiring human labor. As a result, combining a few front-end operations staff with RPA can improve the practice’s punctuality reputation and overall financial performance.
8. Compliance
RPA is completely HIPAA compliant and ensures the security of patient PHI. RPA bots are programmed to follow state and federal healthcare compliance laws, keep logs of who accesses the data, and report any breaches that occur. Overall, it reduces the frequency of HIPAA audits and the hefty fines associated with PHI data breaches. RPA’s goal is to make the patient registration and scheduling process easier.in the healthcare organizations’ ever-changing environment.
Conclusion – Patient Appointment Scheduling using RPA
RPA in healthcare has a variety of advantages and applications. Some of them are critical in creating a positive patient experience and feedback about your healthcare organization. Automated patient scheduling and registration include both attended and unattended bot features that can be used with your existing workflow. The most notable features and application cases in patient scheduling and registration include the following.
