This article was originally published in January 2019 and was updated in April 2020.

Healthcare systems across the world are on a constant quest to improve and expand to reach all those who need their services. High quality and high availability medical services for populations with a broad range of needs, pose several challenges, both operational and organizational.

On one hand, providers are faced with operational challenges such as dealing with sensitive data, strict procedures that need to be followed when handling paperwork, storing health records and others. While patient care is the main focus, often doctors, nurses and other staff are stuck handling administrative tasks that need to be completed in order to be able to focus on the patient.

At the organizational level, there are also numerous repetitive tasks that drive up costs and slow down operations. Whether it’s payment processing or enrolling new members, many tasks are repetitive and follow a certain set of rules. This means that they have the potential to be automated, which would free up time for humans to focus on higher-value tasks.

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Part of our mission here at CiGen has always been to bring more awareness to the changes that RPA brings to companies and people’s careers. To this end, we’ve started a series of articles that focus on the effects and use cases of robotic process automation in different industries.

We’ve discussed several use cases and implementation tips for finance, insurance, law, utilities and mining. Let’s turn our attention towards the healthcare industry: many manual processes here are simple, rule-based and high volume - precisely the process features that call for automation.

To put things into perspective, let’s start with a more general outlook of future RPA trends. Automation has followed its ascending path throughout 2018, and it doesn’t seem to have any intention to stop. According to the Deloitte Global RPA Survey, more than half of the 400 respondents working across industries have already started their automation journey. As many as 72% expect to do this over the next two years. Why? Because robotic process automation brings about quick, significant benefits.