Robots revolutionize healthcare – they help keep patients safer and treat them more efficiently

Filling in medical paper forms when going to a new doctor or hospital for a medical check or intervention can be a true nuisance. Moreover, during this pandemic period, such activities bear additional risks for both patients and medical personnel. This mandatory process could be done more efficiently, in a safer environment, and with no exposure to other patients – with the help of software robots.

Healthcare providers are at a breaking point and have a true opportunity to innovate. They should use robotic process automation (RPA) to their advantage to save time and budget. Reducing physical interaction in classic check-in and anamnesis processes is just one example.  The introduction of check-in counters or e-triage cloud solutions doubled by software robots could serve patients in multiple ways: provide ID information, fill in the necessary medical data, respond to a pre-defined triage questionnaire or even capture body temperature via an infrared thermometer.

The pandemic crisis can be the major trigger for the digital long-term improvement of the healthcare system. Software robots can reduce the overall work volume, eliminate human errors, and automate repetitive efforts. Tasks such as filling or monitoring patient data, alert triggering, assisting with the testing requests and results, patient triage, inventory management, order entry postings, speeding up the patient diagnostic process, onboarding personnel, and verifying the insurance eligibility are ideal candidates for RPA. What they all have in common: they are repetitive, well defined, labor-intensive, prone to human error, and require the use of multiple applications or tools. Once automated, the software robots would save valuable time that is better invested in treating and communicating with the patient.

Major benefits of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for healthcare providers:

• 24/7 availability and flexibility in handling peak periods
• Up to 90% reduction in error rates
• Sustainable labor cost reductions (20% to 80%) – efforts could be transferred to value-added business functions
• Increased productivity and employee satisfaction to foster talent retention
• Up to 80% reduction in cycle times – faster product delivery
• Better visibility and KPI tracking due to standardization of processes

To thrive today, medical researchers can adopt software robots to speed up the development process of new vaccines. These can be used for various purposes like ingredient classification, drug combination, and interaction – data validation, storage condition allocation, and clinical testing automation.

Another example: to store new drugs in safe conditions, a research institution needs to take into consideration various factors such as drug type, temperature, pH value, classification data, storage types, etc. – data that is spread across various systems. It could take an employee several minutes to check and validate each factor and might take hours to test a combination of hundreds of items. With the appropriate software, this can be shortened to mere seconds.

As the healthcare industry is facing the unique opportunity to rethink critical tasks and workflows during these pivotal times, robotic process automation can be the key catalyzer.

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