The Power of RPA in Reducing Burnout in Healthcare

Over the past several years, the healthcare industry has been stretched to its limits, causing burnout in healthcare professionals and a loss of retention for health systems. Burnout is a state where individuals feel physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted – sometimes accompanied by a reduced sense of accomplishment – created by overwhelming and relentless demands.

The COVID-19 pandemic played a large part in this, with healthcare workers experiencing unprecedented levels of stress and trauma. However, the industry has long battled with other elements that also impact the wellbeing of healthcare workers and produce burnout. Rising costs, tighter regulations, rigid time constraints, and frustrating or unorganized environments – among others – are also creating elevated risk for burnout. And burnout isn’t only putting healthcare professionals at risk but affects patient safety and quality of care as well. To combat burnout, one important focus is eliminating repetitive and mundane work – that’s where robotic process automation (RPA) can help. By implementing RPA into a healthcare setting, organizations can help providers easily manage these once challenging tasks while improving operational efficiency and time spent with patients.

What is Robotic Process Automation?

RPA is a software technology that automates human actions while interacting with systems and applications in order to perform tasks. RPA tools are not meant or used for the replacements of healthcare workers, but instead simply ease their workload by performing repetitive, manual, and/or rule-based processes and tasks automatically. By automating these tasks, RPA allows healthcare professionals to spend newly available time focused on more critical aspects of their work.

There are varying degrees of tasks able to be automated within healthcare. For payers, 43% of tasks are estimated to be automatable, whereas providers are estimated to have 33% of automatable tasks due to their primary clinical setting. Yet, regardless of healthcare roles, RPA has the potential to significantly impact healthcare not only through newfound time, but in reducing costs, improving operation efficiency, and increasing job satisfaction.

RPA offers an innovative solution for health systems by alleviating administrative burdens, optimizing electronic health record (EHR) management, enhancing operational workflows, and improving patient communication and level of care. Before implementing RPA, health systems should examine their current workflows and choose tasks that are appropriate for automation and will not create a negative impact on healthcare workers and patients.

Some common automated tasks can include:

• Scheduling and registration
• Discharge management
• Invoice and payment management
• Data entry
• Data analytics and report generation
• Inventory ordering
• Regulatory compliance and audit
• Claims management

5 Ways RPA Can Help Prevent Burnout in Healthcare

By automating repetitive and mundane tasks, RPA becomes a powerful tool for alleviating burnout, which in turn keeps retention rates high for health systems. As the healthcare industry continues to evolve, embracing RPA can create a more efficient and fulfilling environment for healthcare professionals while improving patient outcomes. Here are 4 ways that RPA can help prevent burnout in healthcare workers and keep retention rates high for health systems:

1. Reduces Administrative Burdens

Administrative tasks can be time-consuming and mentally draining for healthcare professionals. By automating various administrative processes, such as patient registration and scheduling, insurance verification, or billing, RPA can eliminate manual data entry and reduce paperwork. Manually entering data and other information can lead to higher operational costs and a longer turnaround time for completing other tasks. In fact, 85% of the 25 largest payers in the US believe automation to be a top administrative cost-reduction method. Automation also enhances the accuracy of this data, reducing unnecessary errors and frustration. By reducing the administrative burdens that healthcare professionals face, they are provided with more time to focus on critical tasks, such as providing personal and quality patient care. Healthcare workers are left feeling less bogged down by these repetitive administrative tasks and are more satisfied within their roles.

2. Optimizes Electronic Health Record Management

EHRs have revolutionized healthcare, but they can be overwhelming to work with and often cause increased frustration, stress, and burnout among healthcare professionals. Much time is spent navigating complex EHR systems, performing unnecessary mouse clicks, and documenting patient information. By implementing RPA, the processes for EHR management can be streamlined by automating actions such as data entry, data extraction, and report generation. This automation improves EHR user-experience and allows healthcare professionals to have less time struggling and more time to interpreting patient data and making informed decisions on personalizing care quickly.

3. Enhances Operational Workflow and Efficiency

Without efficient workflows in place, the workloads of healthcare professionals can increase, causing major delays in task completion and delivery of care and ultimately contributes to burnout. By automating tasks, especially across different departments, RPA can help optimize these operational workflows, allowing them to become timelier and more efficient. For example, RPA can automate the ordering of medical supplies for restocking purposes. This both ensures inventory remains at an adequate level as well as reduces the time spent manually managing the inventory.

4. Improves Patient Communication and Level of Care

Providing effective communication between health systems, providers, and patients is critical for building trust, ensuring compliance, and improving patient outcomes. RPA can play a vital role in these communications by automating tasks like sending appointment reminders and personalized messages, providing patient education, coordinating patient lab tests, and collecting patient feedback. Additionally, RPA enables healthcare professionals to diagnose and treat patients more efficiently through automated patient data and insights collected from medical records. These automations enhance the satisfaction for both provider and patient, reduce delays in patient care, and improve the workload of the provider.