Introduction

Physicians Global is a medical billing company. Physicians Global works with many different doctors offices who see many different patients each day. The billing process requires Physicians Global to collect patient data from several Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and compile it into their billing software. For years, Physicians Global has been completing this workflow manually. But as technology continues to transform the way the healthcare industry operates, Physicians Global is in a great position to digitally evolve. Let’s dive in.

Problem

Firstly, completing the billing claim process by hand was extremely time consuming. It also engaged multiple Physicians Global employees, generating unnecessary costs for the company. Then, there’s the issue of knowledge workers making mistakes during the data pulling and inputting processes—a major concern in an industry as sensitive and confidential as healthcare. Lastly, this labor-intensive process was exhausting healthcare workers. In fact, most physicians experience fatigue after working with EHRs for as little as 22 minutes.

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Solution

Medical billing is a complicated process, but its rule-based and repetitive nature makes it the perfect fit for automation. RPA can be employed in the medical billing process to help automate and standardize mundane and time-consuming tasks. Specifically, we’re focusing on the patient data retrieval and input workflow using EHRs. An RPA-based integration can be created between multiple EHRs and Physicians Global’s billing system for automated patient data retrieval and entry.

Software bots can scour multiple EHRs for patient data. The bots can copy info from the EHRs and paste it into the billing system, all while adhering to programmed compliances.So, while the software bots complete this dull and redundant workflow in the background, billers can spend more time getting the claims out the door faster and following up with insurance companies to collect payments. This work is more fulfilling for biller, so their satisfaction levels rise.

Impact

As a result of process automation, Physicians Global was able to achieve its goal of minimizing the number of “touches” during the medical billing process. Fewer errors and faster processing times were additional impacts of automating this process. Also, medical billers can spend more time getting the claims out the door faster and following up with insurance companies to collect payments. This work is more fulfilling for the billers, so their satisfaction levels rise.

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Conclusion

As an industry that processes more than 1 billion claims each year, medical billing is an ideal workflow for automation. However, many medical billing companies are spending more time than ever in front of a computer doing menial tasks when their time could be better spent dealing with their network of doctors and insurance companies. RPA has been a useful tool to automate medical billing workflows, especially patient information gathering and inputting. RPA bots for healthcare can be used to automatically gather data from EHRs and fill in patient data fields in a medical billing company’s database of billing software. This reduces errors, saves time, mitigates costs, and delights knowledge workers.