Business process automation has proven to be imperative for the healthcare ecosystem, improving business functions, speeding data migrations, and empowering human teams by streamlining repetitive, tedious tasks.
What Does Business Process Automation Look Like in Healthcare?
The goal of automation is not to replace healthcare staff, but rather to augment the human workforce and enable employees to focus on higher-value, more strategic work. There’s no other industry where this is more advantageous than in healthcare. Automation can’t replace doctors and nurses. What it can do is reduce the number of manual, tedious processes that people are burning themselves out with and turn those tasks over to robots. When looking for good areas to apply automation in your healthcare environment, look for standardized, repeatable processes. Identify the processes that, if automated, would make an employee’s job easier. Once the processes are identified, automate them in the order of which will drive the greatest value for the healthcare organization.
What is the Difference Between RPA and BPA?
With Robotic Process Automation (RPA), organizations can automate mundane rules-based business processes, enabling users to devote more time to higher-value work. RPA is commonly used in healthcare automation, where human tasks like submitting forms, reviewing data, and managing work queues are replaced by bots. Business Process Automation (BPA) addresses the overall end-to-end process. BPA can automate an organization’s workflows to improve efficiency. BPA focuses on the entire organization, rather than one automation. Both work hand in hand. RPA hands individual tasks over to software robots to streamline and automate while BPA takes an entire business process and automates it from start to finish.
How Do They Fit Together?
The one thing that both BPA and RPA have in common: The letter “P” for process. At their core, both BPA and RPA exist to improve how healthcare operates. Even though they are somewhat different, they complement each other. RPA can actually extend and enhance BPA’s essential purpose, connecting siloed systems, data, and people, while RPA executes specific rules-based automation tasks in the workflows. With both RPA and BPA, human error is eliminated when tasks are automated, greatly improving the accuracy of healthcare processes. Using automation in healthcare allows hospitals and provider organizations to reduce the need for on-site, manual labor while improving and simplifying the individual steps that make up multiple processes.
Why Are Both Beneficial?
More than a year and a half into the pandemic, COVID-19 continues to undermine performance improvement efforts at U.S. hospitals and health systems, highlighting a need for transformative operational changes, according to Kaufman Hall’s 2021 Healthcare Performance Improvement Report. The impact of process automation on operational efficiency, alignment, and revenue is indisputable, and the 1st year ROI is over 300% in most cases. The pandemic brought with it potentially permanent changes to the healthcare workforce. More than half of respondents (52%) stated the pandemic has driven their organization to adopt new processes, positions, or departments that will be continued moving forward. With leaner staff, more WFH options, and the great resignation, automation brings a level of stability, performance, and productivity that can weather these storms while continuing to support revenue objectives.
Choose the Right Partner
Boston Software Systems has been ensuring healthcare automation projects remain on track and within budget for 30 years. We have a depth of experience working across a wide-range of healthcare applications, as experts on improving usability in hospitals, health systems, provider organizations, and technology solutions.
With over 95% of our healthcare automation projects being completed in under 60 days, savings are right around the corner.
Contact us, to learn more about the benefits of automation for your organization: 866.653.5105 or visit us at: www.bostonsoftwaresystems.com