The Future of RPA in Healthcare

RPA in healthcare is expected to be a $5.5 billion market by 2025.

Source: MarketsandMarkets

RPA or Robotic Process Automation is a technology that automates time consuming and repetitive processes and it has been disrupting businesses of all industries. The healthcare sector is no different as RPA opens significant possibilities of enhancement in terms of efficacy, cost-saving, and quality of treatment. RPA is expected to gain further popularity in the healthcare sector in the near future, and highly advanced uses in clinical decision-making, telemedicine, and personalized treatment are to be anticipated.

 

Clinical Decision-Making

The clinical decision-making tools can assist in automating various clinical processes, including medical data analysis, diagnosis, and treatment planning. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can be integrated with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms in the not-so-distant future to create more intelligent systems, which will be capable of helping the physician in the process of making informed judgments. As an example, an RPA-driven system is able to gather and process data from all sources to create patient profiles, identify possible threats, and provide them with individual treatment plans.

When it comes to RPA in healthcare, nearly 70% of healthcare executives believe that automation will be critical to the success of their organizations in the next five years.

Source: Olive AI

 

Telemedicine

In recent years, telemedicine has observed significant development, and this allowed medical practitioners to provide patients with distance consultations and treatment. One of the numerous ways through which RPA can enhance telemedicine is by automating several administrative tasks, such as appointment scheduling, patient follow-ups, prescription refills, and so forth. Robotic automation of the process of telemedicine with the help of artificial intelligence (RPA) will be capable of providing more complex technologies in the future, which can be joined to artificial intelligence (AI)-driven virtual assistants to offer customers personalized customer support.

One of the applications of clinical decision-making tools that can be observed soon in the sphere of telemedicine is the usage of chatbots to help in interactions with customers and during the first consultation. The information about patients can be gathered using these AI chatbots, the patients may get some basic medical advice, and the patients may find out whether they need further medical care or not.

Personalized Patient Care

Robotic process automation (RPA) can enable healthcare providers to provide customized care and support to a patient by automating numerous processes, among which is prescription management, patient monitoring, and lifestyle coaching. RPA in healthcare is transforming how these automated processes are implemented to enhance patient outcomes. However, it is possible that robotic process automation (RPA) will be integrated with other Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and wearables in the future to offer smarter systems capable of tracking the health of patients in real time, detecting the presence of certain health hazards, and offering personalized recommendations.

The use of remote monitoring equipment is one of the potential applications of this concept as it can be used to gather and transmit patient health information to medical professionals in real-time. An individual with a chronic illness such as diabetes or high blood pressure, say, can use a wearable device to check his or her blood sugar levels or blood pressure in order to control the illness more effectively. Data obtained by these devices can be wirelessly transmitted to a medical expert who can use the same to make any adjustments required on the treatment plan of the patient. This process can be automated to ensure medical professionals will provide more personalized care and at the same time minimize the number of office visits that would be necessary.

 

Opportunities and challenges

Despite all the good things that RPA can bring to the healthcare industry, it has been observed that there are still some challenges that should be overcome. As an example, healthcare companies must ensure that the algorithms that RPA is implemented to run do not contravene any legal requirements like HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability) and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). Moreover, the individuals in the healthcare sector should be sensitized to know how to effectively utilize RPA-driven systems.

RPA has some good uses in the medical sphere, such as clinical decision-making, telemedicine, and personalized attention to patients. The future of RPA in medicine appears to be bright. Yet, to maximize the value of RPA in healthcare and fully realize the potential of this technology in promoting the improvement of patient care and outcomes, the healthcare organizations should be more active in addressing the challenges and opportunities of robotic process automation (RPA).