The benefits of automating healthcare administrative tasks to gain efficiencies have been agreed in principle for some time now. Ongoing conversations evolve around robotic process automation (RPA) and how to enact a meaningful digital workforce to recognize the touted advantages. It is widely known that healthcare is behind other industries in adopting tools and technologies that can deliver significant workflow improvements. The ever-increasing complexities and costs of U.S. healthcare administration require strategies to move beyond just automating tasks.
Analyze process components and flow vs. standalone tasks. What are your expectations?
“In the last 15 months of collaboration with the CognitiveHealth team we have successfully implemented automation in the areas of cash posting, reconciliation and correspondence workflows,” says Sharlene Seidman, Vice President of Patient Financial Services at Yale-New Haven Health (YNHH)
“We are very pleased with the results and continuing to expand our partnership with CognitiveHealth”.
The CognitiveHealth proven methodology examines a complete workflow process including business rules, data sources, input and output to identify and prioritize automation scenarios. We have found that initial automation of processes delivers and, in many cases exceeds, the SLAs or anticipated performance parameters we established with our customer.
“That’s why we distinguish it as Intelligent Process Automation,” says Pavani, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer.
“We use multifaceted technologies to automate the process, not simply implement RPA. A good example would be the results we can cite at Yale.”
Re-engineer vs as-is automation
Our first conversations usually assess whether to automate a process as-is or re-engineer and then automate. While there are benefits and risks for both YNHH found value in the proposed solution to re-engineer before automating the process. A CognitiveHealth project team was formed to collaborate with the customer, and exhaustively map the current process including the manual workflows and tasks. It was possible to visualize the future state of an automated process.
This exercise gave invaluable perspective to the YHHH operations team for optimizing the process, and layed out how the iCANTM engine (Integrated Cognitive Automation Neuron) would take over and more efficiently manage the rules-based, high volume and repetitive processes. iCAN leverages multiple technologies and tools where they are best utilized, such as RPA, AI and machine learning attuned to the precise requirements of the automation use cases to be deployed.
In another example for a healthcare billing company, a change management process was not adequately organized for a re-engineered project in progress. Therefore, CognitiveHealth recommended as an alternative that their current manual process be more effectively automated.
According to the CEO, “When it was first proposed what iCAN could do it sounded to us like science fiction. But when we saw it in action it became what you call a ‘no-brainer’ to deploy iCAN to scale our operations. ”
For this company iCAN not only automates the tedious data entry work, but also frees up the time of precious nursing resources. They are able to turn their focus back to patient care, rather than working on time-consuming Excel spreadsheets. The company is pleased with the initial results and plans to expand iCAN to 100+ facilities. iCAN will process over 250,000 patient records a year in preparing and sending data to various vendors every day.
About CognitiveHealth Technologies
CognitiveHealth Technologies develops and deploys iCAN, a platform purpose-built for healthcare by experts from across the healthcare industry. iCAN automates rules-based, rote tasks to automate an end-to-end process with human resources in the loop as needed, generally for exceptions-type tasks. This enables employees to to enhance their skills and take on new opportunities. CognitiveHealth measures success by demonstrating exponential savings in administrative processes across disparate systems. iCANs has been developed in partnerships with large and innovative health systems.