The future of business is automation and the healthcare industry is no exception. The adoption of high-end and intelligent automation solutions to improve the efficiency of a business has a direct and positive impact on the revenue generated by the business. An efficient automation solution would essentially reduce the burden on your workforce, allowing you to employ only as many resources as an efficiently run organisation would need. In addition to offering your patients and customers better solutions to deal with common problems, you can also cut down on unnecessary spending on mundane tasks.
Office Automation
As we mentioned earlier, there are several ways in which automation can expand a healthcare company’s ROI. Here are just three ways in which it helps.
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1. Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) and Claims Denial
The key problem with RCM processes is its reliance on legacy systems and complex workflows, leading to unwanted claim denials. In fact, 79% of RCM areas use relatively old technologies in applications that are not integrated with newer systems. This leads to numerous manual processes still being used, resulting in 15–20% of claims being denied due to authorization issues or charge capture. An efficient RCM infrastructure can improve providers’ overall revenue by 5% and reduce 20% of their BIR expenses, which account for 50 % of providers’ annual administrative spend, totalling approximately $140B. Healthcare companies have to begin by upgrading an RCM system to implement an IPA approach. In leveraging hyper-automation, providers can successfully automate complex workflows in key areas like pre-claim, patient encounter, transactions and follow-ups and payment posting.
By using AI-enabled data technologies, the automation of a denial analytics dashboard can be optimised to track historical claim denial patterns and automated to follow-up and increase overall clean claim rates. This overall digital transformation of your RCM process will positive gains and maximise your return on investment.
2. Provider Supply Chain
For healthcare companies, the supply chain is complex, and the average U.S. hospital currently spends about $12.1 million more than what is required on supply chain costs. This unnecessarily excess spend can easily be reduced without compromising on clinical outcomes and efficiency using the power of automation. Companies can leverage IPA to streamline key administrative functions such as purchase order management, order setup and entry, inventory management and supply and demand planning.
Automating such supply chain activities and combining them with your revenue cycle operations is crucial to drive improved group purchasing decisions, improve distribution methods, and optimise costs. By integrating data analytics with automation, your organisation can also reduce pricing variation to maximise product use without sacrificing clinical outcomes or efficiency, giving your healthcare staff the opportunity to turn their focus to more value-based activities.
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3. Contact Center
Successful healthcare companies believe that customer experience is an important differentiator and that contact centre interactions play a key role in customer satisfaction and retention. The current systems are largely broken up in different silos and unifying these frameworks to deliver an improved customer experience has now become a priority for providers, because 75% of patient lifecycle interactions are virtually handled by the contact centre. The implementation of an IPA solution combines various applications and delivers relevant data in real-time. This allows for automatic processes to create an efficient post-call wrap-up, increasing the efficiency and quality of the contact centre interactions. The key areas for automation in contact centre operations include billing data and refund management, appointment scheduling, patient data management and data migration and report generation.
Automating these operations directly results in increased ROI, and a 90% increase in the overall operational efficiency. It is the first step in the shift towards multi-channel support, self-service and customer-oriented experiences while helping with patient requests in a timely and accurate manner. As a result, your employees can be freed from repetitive, manual tasks and focus on keeping customer-centric initiatives as a top priority.
In order to address requirements like the ones we have mentioned above, Microsoft PowerApps is a powerful and favourable platform to help you get there. It is one of the key products of the Office 365 suite to help organisations meet their end goals.
What is PowerApps?
The applications built using PowerApps are no different from high-end business apps that are used for complex tasking. PowerApps offers an easy-to-use drag-and-drop user interface to enable organizations to build sophisticated healthcare apps with little to no coding knowledge. More importantly, apps created using PowerApps are built with the ability to interact with Office 365 workloads. This will easily sync the apps you build with other Microsoft data services such as Outlook, Tasks and Calendar.
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1. Unify data integration across multiple sources
PowerApps, along with Microsoft’s powerful Common Data Services (CDS) allows your employees to securely access patients’ data from multiple sources such as Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive, Dropbox, Dynamics 365, Salesforce, SharePoint and many more. This ability allows medical practitioners to conveniently access and share the required patient data on-the-go, from remote and various locations.
2. Increase the efficiency of healthcare practitioners
With the help of PowerApps, numerous manual and mundane tasks such as onboarding medical students, patient registrations, managing clinical handover between doctors and nurses, processing your patients' payment approvals and other requests can be automated. Additionally, the apps can be created and deployed quickly and easily to assist practitioners, allowing healthcare practitioners to focus more on patient care related tasks.
3. Complete user control, security, and compliance
With strict General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance being enforced across several countries, the healthcare industry is constantly under pressure to keep all activities recorded in order to adhere to the compliance requirements. It has also become mandatory for healthcare providers to securely monitor and manage data policies, authorizations and access controls. PowerApps, as an extremely secure platform that provides a plethora of benefits to healthcare providers, can automatically connect to Microsoft’s Active Directory Domain Service (ADDS), which authenticates, authorizes and enforces the security policies on all the applications you build.
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4. Enhance your PowerApps development
The cost of building, distributing, and publishing platform-native applications can be expensive for healthcare providers. Moreover, the complexity of developing the applications will increase with each layer you add to it. This is where PowerApps enables you to use its built-in capability for quick deployment, multi-data sources, connectivity and cost-reduction up to a significant level.
However, streamlining your existing data, improving agility, optimising the apps to meet your business goals, planning and strategizing your objectives to align with other business processes to drive efficiency is a tall ask. This is where Power Apps services can make a significant difference in how you use the PowerPlatform to drive maximum efficiency.
