This article was initially published in September 2019 and was updated in May 2020.

In May 2019, McKinsey mentioned robotic process automation as one of the emerging technologies that will reshape healthcare and create between $350 billion and $410 billion in annual value by 2025.

In 2020, as the situation across the world rapidly changed from business as usual to adapting through a pandemic, RPA is already being implemented to accelerate operations in healthcare, helping organizations and professionals deal with the overwhelm caused by CoVid-19.

UiPath has gathered over 30 CoVid-19 use cases to date. Among the use cases, is a hospital in Dublin that uses the company’s RPA bots to process testing kits results within minutes, thus saving an average of 3 hours per day in the nursing department. Another example is that of a clinic in Cleveland, which used RPA for patient intake tasks such as registering a patient or looking her up in the electronic medical record. The delivery of results was done in seconds as opposed to minutes when the tasks were performed manually.

It’s not just hospitals that have been using RPA during this pandemic, the U.S government has worked with UiPath to implement the use of 500 bots for coronavirus related data analysis. RPA bots can even help the usual person with healthcare. By having a bot deliver specific CoVid-19 news and stats about your community based on your zip code, it saves you from the mental overwhelm of worldwide news on the matter.

It’s clear that automation trends are here to stay, and technologies such as RPA will change for better the way the healthcare system works and its impact on people’s lives.

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According to a McKinsey report from 2016, the healthcare sector had a 36% technical potential for automation. The authors of a 2019 study published in JMIR Research Protocols firmly assert that “the future health sector will undoubtedly involve automation of routine task”.

Implementing robotic process automation in healthcare is expected to be the largest driver of further automation. This is not difficult to understand, if you are aware not only of the resultant increase of the productivity of human employees, but also of the fact that some forms of automation indirectly create not only more work for humans, but also higher value work.

Scheduling, physician order entry, laboratory test-review tasks, personal health records, automation of data collection from patients in the waiting room, electronic medical records, remote test ordering and repetition of prescriptions, clinical decision–support systems, telehealth and telemedicine systems - are just a few of the large spectrum of RPA application areas in healthcare.

Let’s take a look at them individually, to help you get a more practice-oriented idea about the deployment of robotic process automation in healthcare. You can also check a more comprehensive list of RPA use cases in healthcare here.

More effective patients’ scheduling

Software robots can streamline online scheduling. Factors received via the appointment request, like diagnosis, location, insurance carrier, personal preferences, etc., can be gathered in a report, and forwarded to a referral management representative who actually makes the appointment.

Who will benefit? Simply put, everybody: an easier job for the call centre personnel, less mistakes, more satisfied customers, and more evenly distributed appointments across doctors’ working time.

See below how an UiPath robot can be used to assist a call center agent through both identification and triage of customers.