Role Of RPA In Improving Healthcare And Insurance Industries

Optimised RPA drives a faster, more impactful business outcome and RoI, believes Ram Mohan Natarajan, Senior Vice President – Business Transformation, HGS. In an interview with Raelene Kambli, he speaks of its relevance for healthcare organisations

- Raelene Kambli

What is the rationale behind the concept of robotic process automation (RPA) in improving today’s healthcare payment process? Are there any relevant studies that prove this concept?

If you look at the way healthcare companies — consisting of payers and providers — work and interact with their customers/ patients, one would say it’s complex and traditionally been inundated with back office processes that required human intervention to run them. The processes are varied and could range from patient scheduling, billing, claims processing, selling of insurance policies, underwriting and updating database of hospitals.

In the last couple of years, although healthcare companies have been automating many of their processes continuously on their own, there are still a huge volume of exceptions that require human intervention. These healthcare companies across the globe and their business process management (BPM) partners have been adopting automation technologies, especially robotic process automation (RPA) to help them streamline some of these manual processes. RPA, as a primary tool for automating processes, is used to automate these exceptional cases within a shorter time span without any huge investments. The objective is to increase efficiency and accuracy, faster turnarounds and enhanced customer relationships. Of course, companies and geographies are at different levels of maturity in terms of adoption.