Healthcare companies globally spend hundreds of billions of dollars annually on administrative costs, making RPA and intelligent automation a tool that could save them significant sums and enable organizations to focus more on their core expertise—making people well. While penetration of the healthcare by process automation solutions is growing, there still is a vast, untapped opportunity in this market.
There are any number of manual processes that contribute to such high administrative outlays for hospitals and other healthcare providers, but a recent case study from SS&C Blue Prism focused on an organization that applied automation efforts toward scheduling.
University Hospitals of Morcambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust (UHMBT) in northwest England turned to automation to deal with the more than 400,000 appointments that was creating a significant backlog and wait times. Intelligent automation tools reduced the time required for each booking from 15 minutes to four and automatically offered cancelled appointments to other patients.
“Appointment booking is our most intensive, transactional service,” said Marc Hadwin, UHMBT’s head of Digital Services. “And we’ve been able to bring SS&C Blue Prism into that service. Our philosophy is, if we can bring intelligent automation into appointment bookings, we can bring it in anywhere across the business.”
In five months automating one process, according to the case study, more than 36,000 hours of time was returned to administrative staff for higher value work and the organization saved nearly £550,000 ($671,000).
For more details, view the entire case study here.
