An Oxford University study in 2013 told everyone what we’d all been wondering: Will a robot one day take my job? The report — “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation?” — offered its ranking of 702 jobs and careers based on how easily they could be automated.
Not surprisingly, the home-based care sector fared pretty well, as therapists, social workers and mental health professionals made up 40% of the top 10 safest jobs.
That does not mean that robotics and automation have no place in home-based care. The contrary. Robot process automation, or RPA, is software that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate a variety of menial, repetitive tasks that otherwise fall on clinicians. In home health and hospice, RPA is hugely beneficial for revenue cycle work, for example.
“RPA takes large, basic, A-to-Z processes that don’t require subjective human decision-making, because it’s been mapped all the way through, and runs these processes without error, 24/7,” says Jennifer Maxwell, CEO and co-founder of Maxwell Healthcare Associates (MHA).
RPA saves home-based care providers both time and money, and is a long-term cost savings tool. Here are four benefits that home-based care providers are gaining from RPA.
Non-stop, efficient work
Let’s keep this simple: humans are, well, only human.
“Robots don’t sleep,” Maxwell says. “They can continue to process work throughout the night without needing a break or needing to eat or go to the bathroom. And because they’re programmed, there is less chance for error.”
Because it works 24/7, RPA is also efficient.
“RPA increases efficiency and speeds up processes as well,” Maxwell says. “You get more done in less time.”
Machine learning drives quick adaptability
Intake, billing and revenue cycle processes are among those that benefit from RPA, and these processes are easy enough for human workers to learn. But when those processes change, the retraining time can be extensive.
“That’s where I definitely see it bleeding into the cost savings, because you don’t have to supervise that retraining as much,” Maxwell says. While retraining one employee can be difficult, scaling that re-training can be a nightmare. Not so with RPA.
“When we do these large database migrations, they can take days, weeks, thousands of human hours,” she says. “We can get it done in a 10th of the time.”
Increased productivity
These large database migrations are coming up steadily in home health and hospice due to a boom in M&A in 2020 and 2021. Maxwell notes that MHA has already done four database migrations this year alone with their clients who went through the acquisition process — work that frees up clinicians to work at the top of their training.
“It’s been monumental on the time and cost savings for our clients,” she says. “When you think about migrating one patient from one system to another, it’s all of these clicks of the button. It’s taking a nurse or clinician out of the field to do this. Instead, with RPA, they’re still able to see patients and apply a lot of care, instead of sitting in an office.”
Cost savings
Along with maximizing the talents of clinicians and not wasting their time with work that can be automated, RPA lets home-based care providers save big money by reducing labor costs in more mundane, rote areas — Maxwell estimates those savings could be up to 30% annually.
“Depending on the sophistication of the workflow, it could cost an agency between $5,000 and $10,000 to do each year,” she says. “And the more sophisticated the workflow, the higher the cost.”
MHA’s partnership with Element5 brings end-to-end workflow automations to the post-acute care industry. Maxwell recommends that agency owners look at what processes in their organization are right for automation, and dive in that way.
“What we tell our clients is that it can take over the repetitive and time-consuming pieces, and that allows the workforce to focus on more critical tasks,” she says.
This article is sponsored by Maxwell Healthcare Associates. To learn more about how robot process automation (RPA) can help your organization, visit maxwellhealthcareassociates.com.
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