Automated Patient Scheduling

A contact center or medical receptionist is often the first touchpoint of a new patient. It’s the liaison between the healthcare system and the public. It’s also a great place to start with healthcare automation, using attended automation to reduce staff’s workload, while speeding up the patient intake process.

Despite what it sounds like, automated healthcare doesn’t take the humanity out of patient care, but instead makes everyday processes more efficient. Automations can speed up many patient-centric processes, such as scheduling of appointments and approval of referrals, or automatically communicate the correct information directly to the patient, often instantly.

Intelligent Automation and Automation Co-Pilot, are the digital assistants for your call center, front line and back office staff. Adding automation to your healthcare organization translates into a better care experience for your patients and a less stressful experience for your employees.

What are the benefits of automated patient scheduling?

The healthcare industry has a lot of moving parts, and individual organizations aren’t exempt from complexity. With the push towards digital transformation, as well as rising competition, organizations are looking for quick wins in automation. RPA for healthcare and Automation Co-Pilot bring those quick wins to the forefront in healthcare, from front-office patient management to back office bookkeeping.

Appointment Scheduling

Scheduling an appointment can be tedious; you have to find the right appointment time, doctor and location, which can affect contact center KPIs. Healthcare automation allows agents to search across multiple systems from a single screen. The entire manual workflow can be minimized and automated into a smooth, quick transaction.

Faster Prior Authorization Process

Front line clinical staff often deal with moving information between documents and Electronic Medical Records systems to submit claims. Automation Anywhere’s Document Automation helps by extracting data, as well as validating and boosting communication between clinical staff and insurance teams, among other tasks, greatly speeding up the approval process.

Increased Accuracy

Patients who can rely on their care, time, and diagnosis, trust your practice and will come back. Inputting data incorrectly puts patients at risk because they could receive medical treatment that might endanger their health and well-being. Using RPA technology to reduce human error allows customers to get the best treatment that they can.

Stronger Communication

Better communication enables continuous engagement. Patient data paired with automation can help nudge patients by text or email to make appointments, so they don’t miss out on important checks. You can deliver personalized updates, reminders and offers, so your patients know what’s happening throughout the healthcare journey.

Greater Productivity

An agent may have to put a patient on hold, log into over ten applications, compile the patient’s files and search for the answer to the patient’s question. With RPA, the patient can enter information into a pre-call chatbot, which automatically fetches the data from the entire system before Automation Co-Pilot passes the data to the agent in seconds.

Advanced Integrations

Bots can match quality protocols against AHRQ, HEDIS and other scores. Advanced bots using ABBYY OCR sync with Automation Co-Pilot to capture data, delivering fast results. Instead of scanning endless information online or manually inputting data, Automation Co-Pilot allows patients to send in health forms that are automatically and accurately input into the system.

Who benefits from automated patient scheduling?

When utilizing automated patient scheduling software, patients benefit from shorter wait times and quicker access to healthcare providers. Your organization benefits from patient satisfaction and faster workflows.

Contact Center Agents

Logging into a bunch of apps, pulling together data and trying to help a patient is a lot for one person to do with any accuracy. Having a bot that automates the workflow helps reduce stress and time, which, in turn, reduces errors and increases the agent’s ability to handle patient calls.

Healthcare Providers

For every hour of face-to-face patient time, doctors spend another two hours buried in paperwork and EMRs. With Automation Co-Pilot, doctors choose a dashboard, like completed test results, and bots pull patient information, making it easier and faster to monitor, diagnose and respond to emergencies.

Clinical Staff

PFT scheduling is complex for clinical staff. It requires multiple systems, various pathways, and remembering the various steps for each patient. Automation Co-Pilot guides staff through workflows depending on the answers to each question. This makes the process more efficient and accurate.

Medical Centers

Automated healthcare solutions like Automation Anywhere’s Document Automation allow for data to be quickly digitized, saving medical centers months of time. That data can then be monitored, reported and analyzed to provide granular audit trails for regulatory compliance.

St. John of God Health Care processes nearly $1B AUD with RPA.

Customer Story

Technology like RPA has been available for years and the benefits are huge for businesses. Get started. Absolutely don’t wait.

Daniel Kennedy, Intelligent Automation Services Manager

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25,000

Hours saved annually

Bots in production

20%

Reduction in operational costs

How healthcare automation can help your practice?

There's no doubt about it, many places of organizations and practices are suffering from longer wait times in the wake of the pandemic. But with bot automations, patients can cut out the middleman, getting scheduled quicker and easier with your help. How will automation help your healthcare organization thrive?

Faster Patient Scheduling

Self-service for sanitary and quick interactions
Automated scheduling for off-business hour client intake and convenience
Appointment management in case a patient needs to cancel or reschedule, so that another patient can easily snag an appointment
Telehealth solutions for patients without available reliable transportation, who have a minor question, or they're taking pandemic precautions
Mobile app to pull up quick and convenient access to scheduling system

Reduced Notifications

Appointment scheduling software takes care of patient scheduling - less phone calls, less notifications
No need to get inquiries about available time slots - it'll already be available online
Patients will rave on social media about quick scheduling, waiting room reduced times, and better healthcare
Listing appointment times will be a thing of the past
Make medical appointments an easy transaction, instead of something to dread
Less customer cancellation, more medical diagnoses

Quick Medical Billing

Reduce billing costs with higher claim fulfillment and less claim denial
Pricing breakdown is easy for customer to lookover, without using valuable employee time
Patient access to their bills, whenever they need immediate help
No need to frequent medical office for multiple questions or concerns
Hipaa-compliant with online medical billing practices
Patients utilize payer websites for quick results

Instant Reminders on Mobile Devices

Patients receive text message and voice message reminders
Telemedicine updates for virtual-seeking patients
Easy availability of appointment slots through online appointment software
Reach out to patients about medical updates through automated healthcare
Patients get notified when prescriptions are ready
Real-time reminders and updates about critical patient information

What to look for in an automated patient scheduling tool?

When you're looking for automated patient scheduling software, there are three points to consider: security, efficiency and expense.

It’s a must to remember that healthcare organizations require layers of security. Therefore, your automation solution should include secure access based on user privileges.

You also want your organization or practice to run efficiently. Efficiency makes the Digital Workforce, a network of intelligent software bots, just as integral a component. It augments physician and staff functions using technologies such as artificial intelligence, natural language processing and machine language. Bots like these can mimic employee cognitive behavior, learning from the tasks they perform and completing complex processes.

Cloud-native solutions like Automation 360, Document Automation and Automation Co-Pilot integrate easily into both your legacy and modern systems. No expensive, time consuming IT overhaul, just solid support and function.

How to get started?

The best way to decide if automated patient scheduling works is to test it. Contact us for a guided demo with one of our automation experts to learn about various bots and get help with a proof of concept for stakeholders.

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What is automated patient scheduling in healthcare and why does it matter?