As a traditional industry, healthcare is rife with slow, manual processes that consume a ton of time and drive up operational costs. Luckily, integrating robotic process automation (RPA) into your electronic health record (EHR) system can help combat this issue and allow you to save time and money where it counts. So let's dive into how. 

Reducing the Labor Burden

EHR systems are a vital element of modern healthcare environments and offer countless benefits over their paper-based cousins. However, EHRs aren't perfect. Often, hospital admin staff have to spend a considerable chunk of their working day doing manual tasks like data entry. And with healthcare being such a data-heavy industry, many healthcare providers are forced to hire more staff to keep up with the data entry demands. 

But according to a recent Deloitte study, deploying RPA in MedTech can lower the costs of processing and human labor by up to 80%. But how? RPA systems can collect data from incoming sources and copy that data into the relevant parts of the EHR system, all without human input. 

In one case study, a global healthcare company saved 400,000 man-hours in the finance and accounting operations team by automating 140 processes with 200 bots. 

Improving Accuracy

Minor errors in medical data can cause significant issues. Sometimes these errors are reasonably small, like a simple typo, but can result in serious outcomes like poor patient experiences or even unsuitable treatment. 

RPA helps by automating standard steps in the EHR process usually performed by people who are more naturally error-prone. For example, RPA bots can extract and manipulate data with nearly 100% accuracy, eliminating costly errors.

Bringing Together Disparate Systems

One of the reasons managing electronic health records is so complex is due to the many disparate systems within typical healthcare environments. For example, organizations may have one system for housing patient records, another for claims processing, and multiple overflowing databases. 

Getting these systems to communicate effectively with each other can be challenging, especially where outdated or bespoke technology is involved. Of course, one solution is to overhaul the current EHR application environment with a modern, more powerful alternative. But this is prohibitively expensive, particularly when we're heading into an economic downturn. 

Automation offers a better and much more affordable alternative. Healthcare companies can save money by forgoing costly IT projects in favor of tiny but powerful RPA bots. RPA bots can log into one system, extract the necessary data, and transfer it to another system in a matter of seconds. This ensures information is effectively shared throughout all the healthcare organizations' critical systems, and enabled the organization to achieve a single source of truth. 

Appointment Scheduling 

Manually managing appointments is both time-consuming and expensive. For example, it's estimated that missed appointments cost the US healthcare industry an eye-watering $150 billion a year. And while it may not be possible to eliminate no-shows completely, RPA can dramatically reduce them.