According to the United States Census Bureau, by 2050, the percentage of people 65 and over will be more than twice the percentage of young children. This means that the number of people who need medical assistance will continue to rise. One recent trend has emerged to better utilize existing resources to adapt to this demographic shift: robotic process automation (RPA). RPA is a type of business process automation technology that allows organizations to emulate and replace human interactions with digital systems. By enabling organizations to automate processes at a fraction of the cost and time previously required, this technology is both cost-effective and labor-efficient. Moreover, this technology is generally non-intrusive in nature, and utilizes an organization’s existing infrastructure without needing to insert external factors that could disrupt a workflow that has been working perfectly well. According to the statistics available in McKinsey Quarterly, 36% of the healthcare tasks — mostly, managerial and back-office — can be replaced by automation.
KPMG estimates that the value of the global IT robotic automation market will reach roughly $5 billion in 2020. Within the overall market, the pharma and healthcare segment are projected to expand at the highest CAGR over the forecast period. RPA solutions are increasing in popularity and adoption in the healthcare industry as the sector is usually characterized by inefficiencies and labor-intensive activities driven by stringent patient data compliances and continuously expanding amounts of data. RPA robots are capable of mimicking almost any predictable human interaction, allowing them to log-in to applications, move files, fill in forms and more. Leveraging this technology in healthcare presents unique opportunities that can free up clinicians’ time for more patient interaction and care. KPMG has indicated that RPA can increase savings up to 50% for a health organization between streamlining processes, efficiency, and reducing costs.
Healthcare organizations are beginning to implement RPA in various aspects such as admissions and discharge, clinical data interoperability, and health plans. With the help of RPA software, healthcare organizations can extract and optimize patient data more effortlessly. Moreover, RPA software has the capability to manipulate collected data to generate additional analytics that offer clinical staff valuable insights to help them make more accurate diagnoses. When it comes to processing patient appointments, RPA can quickly streamline the process by scanning the patient data as they fill out a new patient form, build out a condensed report, and direct the appointment request to the correct department or function based on key attributes such as location, diagnosis or insurance carrier.
Another way that RPA may contribute to meaningful savings for health clinics is by more accurately identifying the health care claims that do not meet the requirements, which is estimated to be about 30–40% of total claims. Moreover, the entire claims process is generally very time-intensive and error-prone which can have a major impact on a clinic’s cash flow. RPA can help streamline the claims process by speeding up the data processing aspect while simultaneously reducing the number of errors. By more accurately processing the claims, the potential of the clinic seeing higher collections also increases.
Kli Capital portfolio company, Shift Health, is a provider of RPA software that offers medical practice automation and claims management services. Targeted toward small to medium-sized clinics, the company’s software has features including cloud-based scheduling, clinical documentation, RCM and clinical integration, and many others that help healthcare organizations support patient care efficiently and cost-effectively. Shift Health’s automated workflows work seamlessly with existing processes and applications, ranging from on-premise electronic health records systems to browser-based web applications. Shift Health’s platform is the healthcare industry’s first intelligence automation platform that does not require their customers to hire engineers to operate the bots. Through simple drag-and-drop widgets, customers are able to build out their own automation bots or leverage one of the existing templates to quickly build out their automation tools. Their RPA software is dedicated to freeing up valuable time for physicians and administration to focus on more important areas such as patient care.
Shift Health was founded in 2018 by Lance Rodela, who brings a wealth of healthcare experience as a product developer at organizations such as Aetna. Originally focused on improving claims management processes, the company has since then pivoted to building out a fully-functioning RPA software that can be used across a wide range of services for a clinic. The company has since then revamped their sales efforts to offer the software to new clinics across the U.S. The Company has created an easy-to-implement process of discovering the most mundane and repetitive tasks in the customer’s existing workflow and leveraging intelligent automation tech to manage workflows while making sure it continues to interoperate directly with the clinic’s existing systems.
“We are constantly looking for ways to streamline the processes of our various healthcare partners across their entire workflow,” remarked Lance Rodela, CEO of Shift Health. “We are truly excited to continue expanding our capabilities to better address the needs of our customers.”
As a result of the recent surge of Covid-19, patient volumes had dropped precipitously during the last several months. Although some patients have started coming back to their doctor’s offices, many are still afraid of going to the doctor in this post Covid-19 era. As a result, many small to mid-sized healthcare clinics are looking to run extremely lean to match revenues with their payroll. By leveraging Shift Health’s RPA software, many clinics are able to reduce their costs while increasing their efficiency and labor utilization. Some key customers have come to Shift Health to indicate that they needed their services more than ever during these tumultuous times. The Kli Capital team will continue to work closely with Lance and his executive team to continue expanding their essential services to more clinics across the country.
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