The healthcare system consists of multiple arduous tasks that need substantial resource allocation, leading to increasing operations costs and slow processes. Leveraging the power of Robotic Process Automation (RPA), the healthcare industry can address many issues and make the entire system more efficient while improving patient satisfaction.

What is Robotic Process Automation?

Robotic Process Automation is a kind of automation technology that allows organizations to integrate and emulate human interactions within digital systems for more efficient business processes. Organizations can automate their processes at a fraction of the cost and time with RPA.

It is a non-intrusive technology and uses organizations’ existing infrastructure without disturbing its essential systems. Leveraging this technology in the healthcare sector presents opportunities to enhance healthcare delivery and free up clinician’s time.

Why is RPA important for the healthcare sector?

Robotic Process Automation can help reduce healthcare sector inefficiencies and contribute to better healthcare delivery, which is vital for both the public and the industry.

Like every other industry, the healthcare sector also has challenges such as strict regulations regarding patient data and fewer resources to deal with such regulations. With RPA enabled processes, healthcare providers can avoid long-running and costly digital transformation implementation projects and reap the rewards faster, thus enabling them to channel more resources to the healthcare industry.

RPA offers many benefits to the healthcare industry-

With robotic processes, patients can schedule their appointments without intervention from medical staff in clinics/hospitals. Therefore, eliminating the need for resource allocation for appointment scheduling enhances customer experience since patients can schedule appointments faster.
Another area where RPA is beneficial for the healthcare system is in managing the claim management process. Once healthcare service is delivered, the billing process typically takes time due to repetitive and manual claims management processes. With RPA enabled claim management, human errors can be avoided, and processing can be much faster.

In addition, RPA bots can streamline the process of front-office support, thus making it easy for the support staff to manage patient queries. Furthermore, RPA allows healthcare providers to document and track each step in the process in a structured format, thus enabling the organization to be audit compliant.

Moreover, RPA in the healthcare sector can help staff optimization since robots will complete all mundane tasks, thus giving employees more time to manage the strategic tasks.

Allowing robotic technology to handle business processes will improve clinical workflows and save time and enable tailored treatment for patients.
How can RPA strengthen the healthcare sector supply chain management?

In the quest to create a patient-centric and resilient supply chain, the healthcare industry is now turning to digital supply chain management. The digital supply chain networks not only provide better visibility across the end-to-end supply chain but enable members to share and access a continuous flow of actionable insights and information that can be used to improve supply chain processes continually.

The supply chain network ensures that patients, pharmacies, and healthcare providers get the medical supplies and medicines efficiently. RPA enabled processes can help in augmenting manufacturing and logistics processes.

The healthcare supply chain network has been continually fronting disruptions such as global health crisis, new regulatory mandates, and natural disasters. The ongoing pandemic challenged the resiliency of the healthcare supply chain. Now, many organizations are taking steps to shore up their supply chain, and one such step has been increasing the adoption of RPA.

The introduction of RPA in the healthcare supply chain can help improve resiliency by ensuring better controls and compliance, increasing process efficiencies, improving quality and much more. By leveraging RPA, the healthcare industry can streamline its key administrative functions such as order set up and entry, purchase order management, inventory management, and supply & demand planning.
It can help supply chain managers to track the inventory required in hospitals, such as syringes, needles, gloves, medicines, etc., by notifying them about the changes in demand and supply.

Final Word

Robotic Process Automation is a new technology with growing capabilities, and it not only automates the process but also increases accuracy. Robotic Process Automation can lead conversations, keep chaotic data structured, and make complex decisions.

The healthcare industry stands to gain from investing in Robotic Process Automation as it can result in improved patient care at less cost.

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The general geopolitical trend towards nationalization, Brexit, the US-China trade war, and lately, the pandemic have changed the priorities of many supply chain frontrunners. They have to now balance operational efficiency and cost with more resilience.

Building a resilient supply chain

There is no hundred percent certain way to overcome the threats to supply chains like natural disasters, accidents, and international disruptions. The situation becomes even more complicated in case of a global pandemic or a terrorist attack. This is because the historical data does not include the use of predictive statistical tools to ensure that risks like these can be contained.

However, some organizations cope much better than others with both manifestation and prospect of indefinable risk. These organizations don’t have a common secret formula or even many of the same processes to deal with such situations, but they share an essential trait – resilience.

The concept of resilience is not new. The ability of an organization to successfully face the unforeseen has always been the essential element of success.

Achieving resilience

Supply chain resilience no longer means merely the ability to manage risks. In fact, the ability to manage risks means being better placed than the competitors to deal with it and even gain advantage from such disruptions.

Here are the three most important strategies to adopt to build resilience in your supply chain.

Diversify resources

Despite being the foremost step in alleviating risk, many organizations carry vital parts of their supply portfolios with one point of failure. Businesses need to reduce their dependence on sourcing from a single region, supplier, or country. During the Tsunami and Tohoku earthquake in 2011, the global automotive industry was crippled as the large concentration for automotive parts and accessories was manufactured in Japan. Even in the present situation, when the coronavirus first appeared in China and the ‘world’s factory’ went under lockdown, many industries and economies suffered. 

There has to be a simple yet effective strategy, which should be a combination of offshore and near-shore suppliers for every component. Broadly speaking, there is a need to develop a strategy where the regional supply chains are developed that can source and distribute products within a region. Besides that, the focus should also be on building redundancy so that if one region is disrupted, other region’s suppliers can step up.

Impact is broad, getting diversified can reduce risk because if you have a concentration of suppliers at high risk of financial default, then it is sensible to qualify alternative sources with a better financial footing.

Build reserves

The typical safety-stock calculations and inventory-optimization can disregard the element of fundamental risk. With the concept of eliminating single points of failure, it is crucial to carry exigency safety-stocks, especially for low-volume parts that might impact the availability of high-value features. Broadly speaking, a business needs to develop inventory plans to ensure supplies over a long projection by taking into account possible shortages during a disruption.

During the ongoing pandemic, approximately 5 million masks and 2000 respirators were released by the US Department of Defense from its stock reserves to help fight the crisis. Most of the time, these strategic reserves go unnoticed unless there is a crisis like this. The value of building strategic reserves has become increasingly clear over the last few years. These reserves can safeguard against the ‘black swan’ events that are rare but can cause a pragmatic threat to businesses.

Besides strategic reserves, there is also a need to build strategic relationships that can make a difference in the long run. The foundation of all businesses is built on relationships with your business partners, customers, and suppliers.

Sense, foresee and respond with agility

The best supply chain teams stay ahead in the market trends for their products, customers, the latest design practices, suppliers, and emerging technology trends. They utilize the content services that help them consolidate such sources of insight to forestall risks and opportunities and promptly take proactive actions even before their competitors. For instance, monitoring leading indicators of a supplier’s financial status to anticipate the risk of default.

Furthermore, businesses need to be mindful of single sources that could be formed from the ripple effect of other risks. For instance, obsolescence or default of one source within a two-fold-sourced component will create a single-source situation that will be high-risk.

To help organizations recognize market shifts early, and take pre-emptive actions, the sourcing platforms need to track inflection points in demand, trends, cost, lead time, the financial health of the supplier, and consolidation of suppliers across various commodities. 

To conclude, there will always be events that cannot be anticipated beforehand. However, the best performers build processes with upright learning cycles. The rewards for building a resilient supply chain are significant – the business will not only be able to withstand all kinds of disruptions but also increase its competitiveness.

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