Recently, Tacstone Technology hosted the webinar “The promise of RPA in healthcare.” A brief review.

As many as 40 applications from the sector confirmed what we see in our daily practice: RPA is booming in the healthcare sector as well. Interest in the possibilities of this new technology is growing rapidly, as is the number of concrete initiatives. An excellent moment to organize a webinar to exchange ideas and experiences.

The speakers:

Hans Zekveld
(UMCU)

Mark de Poorter
(Tacstone Technology)

Ebert Knol
(Tacstone Technology)

Luc Zuidhof
(UiPath)

Outcomes research “RPA in healthcare anno 2022”

First, Mark de Poorter presented the results of an earlier study on the application of RPA within hospitals. This research was conducted by Tacstonian Jeroen Smits for his Master of Business Administration – Digital Business at the University of Twente. Some key takeways from this research:

• RPA is an accelerator of digitization in hospitals
• All participating hospitals in the study see the potential for widespread adoption of RPA in their hospitals
• Hospitals also see RPA eventually deployed in their primary care processes
• The application possibilities for RPA are broader than just within Finance, P&O or healthcare administrations
• RPA is currently deployed primarily on a small scale at the departmental level. The challenge is to move from a departmental approach to a group-wide approach.

In healthcare, RPA is not just about saving time, but primarily about improving quality

RPA is often positioned as technology to take repetitive work out of the hands of employees in order to free up time for value-added tasks. This is 100% correct, yet we see that often too little attention is paid to the qualitative improvements you can achieve with RPA. We see in practice that RPA within healthcare institutions results in:

• Continuity in execution of processes
• Shorter reaction times
• Lower workload, especially in peak periods
• Higher data quality through more controls
• Fewer errors in execution and therefore less repair work
• Better compliance (meeting increasing laws and regulations)
• “Automation mindset” among employees

Use of storytelling to visualize qualitative savings from RPA

The number of hours saved with RPA is easy to measure because virtual workers automatically report how many processes and transactions they performed. Multiply this number of transactions by the average number of minutes per transaction, and you can make a meaningful statement about time savings. With quality improvement, this is a bit different. The challenge is to make this measurable and then also visible in the organization. We often use Storytelling for this; an inspiring communication method to get a message across.

What can storytelling do? Here are a few examples of quality improvements through virtual employees that capture the imagination:

• “Robie archived 5,000+ COVID-19 test results in the first 3 months. As a result, we avoided the previously feared increase in workload in the P&O department.”
• “Robot Anne checked 20,000 incoming invoices in December, resulting in a 5% reduction in dropouts while coding invoices. A great example of checking on the front end, rather than fixing on the back end.”

• “During Christmas dinner, our robot Jaap Vlug coded over 200 more Diagnosis Treatment Combinations in 3 hours so that they were still in the system before January 1.”
• “By deploying RPA, we have reduced the turnaround time from requesting authorization to accessing systems from 3 days to 15 minutes.”

Awareness of urgency and potential widely shared during webinar

The potential of RPA and the urgency to get started on it in the near future (if you haven’t already started) was widely shared by webinar participants.

However, we also see that many institutions that have started RPA earlier often run into issues after the start-up phase that can (temporarily) get in the way of scaling up. Consider, for example, ownership and role distribution (“Who is actually in charge?”), training needs and information security. For many healthcare organizations, early and active involvement from the top of the organization is important to correctly recognize the strategic importance of technology. “Start small, but think big” was mentioned a number of times. Work with the shop floor to build a working robot, then find ambassadors and sponsors at the top to deploy RPA more broadly. Look for connection with departmental goals, so that it does not become a technology push but RPA becomes part of a broader program.

RPA Quick-Scan: explore the potential of RPA

With a low-threshold RPA Quick-Scan we help healthcare institutions and hospitals to explore the application possibilities of RPA in one or more departments. Based on these possibilities, we provide insight into revenues and costs, and give advice on how to take the first steps.

Several participants have already used the (free) RPA Quick Scan. Also interested in an RPA Quick Scan? Please contact Mark de Poorter, partner Tacstone Technology.