Delivering quality care and ROI with healthcare automation

Today’s hospitals and healthcare systems face a difficult balancing act: managing rising demands for clinical quality and operational efficiency as financial restraints increase.

But even as medical leaders tighten their belts, they’re investing in healthcare automation. The global healthcare automation market was valued at $38.6 billion in 2023, and the market is projected to reach $94 billion by 2033.

Why? Strategic investments in healthcare automation offer providers long-term benefits towards higher patient and clinician satisfaction, increased operational efficiency, better revenue integrity, and a stronger bottom line. Implementing AI-powered automation is the greatest opportunity for healthcare leaders to get ahead of the curve and build their ROI.

Healthcare providers face mounting challenges

A key element of healthcare is “care,” but all too often, employee burnout, administrative overload, and slashed budgets get in the way of providers delivering the highest quality of care possible. Even before COVID, healthcare providers walked the line between providing excellent care and ensuring efficient business processes.

Every day, healthcare leaders grapple with challenges like the burden of dealing with documentation and other administrative tasks, labor costs and shortages, capacity and clinical quality issues, and revenue integrity. These issues lead to a decline in revenue, quality of care, and staff morale. And while clinicians rightly want to focus on their patients, the administrative work required to address these challenges can’t be put off.

“Backlog can’t happen in healthcare. If a pre-visit summary is missed in the evening, it takes time the next day and that might mean a patient can’t be seen,” noted Jason Warrelmann, Vice President, Global Services and Process Industries at UiPath, during a recent webinar exploring ways to cut administrative burdens for hospitals and clinics.

Increasingly, healthcare leaders are turning to automation to take care of necessary paperwork, so providers can get back to doing what they love—taking care of patients.

A healthy dose of healthcare automation

Automation isn’t just for repeatable tasks like data entry or standardized reminders (although it does that too). Today’s AI-powered automation can manage more complex processes across the entire healthcare spectrum:

• Patient access: onboarding, scheduling, referrals management, and outreach.

• Care delivery: documentation, identification of care gaps, reports triaging, remote visits, and virtual monitoring.

• Revenue cycle management: prior authorization, coordination of benefits, audits, and claims.

• Practice management: clinic scheduling, financial reporting, documentation, and tracking.

A unified automation platform can seamlessly integrate across a hospital or clinic’s entire electronic health record (EHR) stack, from patient to provider to payer. Human employees spend less time managing technology and more time on cognitive work.

“You’re optimizing that human and then using the robot to decide how to orchestrate all those technologies together,” explained Warrelmann during a virtual coffee chat about revenue cycle management.

Think of automation not as a replacement for your human providers, but instead as their digital healthcare assistants, ready and eager to tackle the tasks that would otherwise take them away from patients.

Healthcare automation for strategic success

According to an Accenture study, an amazing 70% of healthcare workers’ tasks could be reinvented by technology or automation, decreasing repetitive tasks, redeploying resources, and improving the patient experience. Investments in automation make big improvements in strategic outcomes for healthcare organizations, including:

Increased staff productivity and satisfaction

AI-powered automation and integration with EHR systems reduce time spent on manual data management while delivering insights into patient information and enabling coordination of care across networks and specialists.

Improved quality of care

Charge capture and coding, order entry, medication management, and documentation are all important elements of care delivery, but can be time -consuming, repetitive tasks. Automation easily manages these and more, improving time-to-treatment and reducing opportunities for error.

Enhanced revenue integrity

An AI-powered revenue cycle management solution improves revenue integrity by automating processes like clinical data repository (CDR) management, independent medical examination and independent medical review (IME/IMR) audits, coordination of benefits, prior authorizations, and claims posting, reducing denials, and speeding up payment.

One of our customers, a large, not-for-profit, integrated medical group based in the United States (U.S.), has seen tangible results from automation. They implemented AI-powered automation in almost every element of their operations, including revenue cycle management. They’ve used robots to reduce friction around clinical denials, reducing errors, driving revenue faster to their bottom line, and allowing their workforce to make key decisions.

A healthcare system’s greatest assets are its people, and investing in automation to support their work is critical to their success. Automation reduces administrative costs, optimizes resources, and improves operational efficiency. The result: a stronger ROI for medical organizations.

Automation for healthier healthcare

Healthcare leaders recognize automation is an investment they need to make to stay relevant, attract and retain top talent, provide the highest quality of care, and drive revenue. Fortunately, putting healthcare robots to work is easy with the right automation platform.

The UiPath Business Automation Platform integrates seamlessly across a healthcare operation’s tech stack, providing AI-powered assistance from a single, user-friendly platform.

The UiPath Platform enables medical providers to empower their workforce, improve revenue integrity, and increase ROI with:

• Intelligent document processing (IDP): increase efficiency by using AI to automatically process documents and communications, including specialized out-of-the-box models for documents like CMS 1500 health insurance claim forms and UB-04 forms.

• Process discovery: gain end-to-end visibility and continuously discover your organization’s biggest automation opportunities for a faster ROI.

• UiPath Clipboard AI™: reduce manual processes and seamlessly connect your key healthcare platforms by automatically extracting, transforming, and appending data.

• Generative AI: reduce burnout and improve productivity by managing complex processes like denial correspondence management, medical coding, and patient referral management.

• Healthcare Solution Accelerators and automation frameworks: realize faster time to value with automation frameworks custom-built for healthcare, including CMS claims conversion, insurance claims submission status, digital claim interchange request, and Epic optimization.

An investment in automation helps return the “care” to healthcare. To learn more about the benefits of investing in enterprise-level healthcare automation and the critical components of deploying an effective automation strategy, read our white paper "Healthcare automation 2.0: The 4 key steps leaders must take to drive improvements + ROI."