This is a guest post by Jeff Hatfield, vice president (VP) of Client Solutions at Amitech Solutions. Amitech Solutions is a UiPath partner.
There is no industry where seconds matter more than healthcare.
For decades, organizations have worked to shorten time to treatment for patients through data and analytics. Most recently, companies are advancing healthcare with Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
We’ve seen this first hand. Automation has been a critical part of how we accelerate time to value for patients and providers. High-risk pregnancy evaluations are one example. When high-risk pregnancy evaluations can be processed from weeks to seconds, it ensures that the right information gets to the right person at the right time. It literally can save lives.
We tend to think of automation implementations with four pillars:
- Standards
- Support
- Advocacy
- Innovation
In this post we will share our top tips for speeding RPA implementations with these pillars in mind.
Create a single source of truth through standards and common tools
RPA is no longer defined by pilot programs, but rather by scale. The world is advancing through the hype cycle towards enlightenment and productivity, particularly as organizations re-imagine how work gets done in the wake of the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19).
This is a unique moment for anyone, whether you are an RPA beginner or a grizzled veteran, to identify automation best practices as standards, and find reusable components.
Thankfully, it’s easier than ever to do both.
Many of our clients use UiPath Automation Hub to help them manage the entire lifecycle from idea generation and discovery to building to measurement.
What used to take a combination of Microsoft Excel worksheets, Post-It notes, and in our case a custom-built system based on Wikipedia, can now easily be managed from one location. What took hours to sift through can now be found easily by all your automation program’s stakeholders.
Automation Hub has yielded 20X faster automation implementations for us.
Fostering best practices, or standards, is just as important as speed.
In the healthcare space it’s important to configure your Automation Hub in such a way that you can source automation ideas both from your automation center of excellence (CoE) and workers on the ground who know processes best.
It’s also crucial to note that you can use tools like UiPath Task Capture (included with Automation Hub) to standardize how you document your processes. Rather than using a mix of Visio, screenshots copied into Microsoft Word documents, and drawings our business analysts can document the design process and output it into a process definition document (PDD), or even a XAML file to develop in UiPath Studio. This also helps accelerate workflows for RPA developers.
UiPath Task Capture has changed the game in terms of how as-is and to-be processes are captured, resulting in a 4-times faster documentation process. Like Automation Hub, Task Capture also democratizes process discovery, enabling everyday users to define how they perform a process (which can also help in defining best practices).
Promote advocacy and innovation within your company
In our engagements we consistently find that any employee can have a groundbreaking, innovative automation idea. While this may seem paradoxical, UiPath Automation Hub both democratizes idea intake and establishes a single source of truth. In hindsight, past ways of aggregating ideas now feel cluttered and stale.
We even use the tool for capacity planning, and to manage our multiple RPA teams. It’s all about value. Use Automation Hub to ideate and rank automation efforts.
Once you have your UiPath Automation Hub set up according to your standards, have built support for your program, and have enabled a framework for advocacy, you have innovation.
While standards and innovation may seem like opposite ends of the spectrum, they are equally important. Try to build standards that are flexible enough to continually encourage innovation through advocacy.
Build support for a self-funding program
As the COVID-19 curve evolves, we’re seeing a shift away from patient intake, testing, etc. While these will continue to be important, we’re anticipating a big wave of rescheduled voluntary treatments. Most healthcare organizations will have a limited period to get back to capacity and automation is critical in helping organizations return to a sense of normal.
Practically, this means setting up Automation Hub to ensure that automations are driving unique business value, which naturally can look different depending on the business. Successful RPA initiatives are deliberate and thoughtful about expected results. We see organizations move fast and iteratively, going through a three-week process to find high-visibility, easy return on investment (ROI) automations.
The next step is to build out a 12-month roadmap, showing how the automation program pays for itself.
UiPath Automation Hub does this with ease through its unique idea assessment system, which helps us show clients automation opportunities ranked by ROI. This is particularly useful when evangelizing automation within an organization. As you build your case for ROI, automation advocates naturally emerge.
While organizations need general guidance to get to a self-funding roadmap, Automation Hub has many features to help. We’ve been scaling technologies for years. This is the first time we’ve had an actual tool to help us do that.
Healthcare is a complex ecosystem full of stakeholders ranging from patients, to payers, to providers. So, when thinking about calculating ROI, it’s important to ensure that you’re measuring relevant returns.
In this vein, you can customize Automation Hub to include information like business processes within revenue cycle, claims management data, capital savings for reducing cycles, etc. Your metrics will vary based on your industry. While UiPath Automation Hub comes with great measures of value (like hours saved and ROI), you can bring your own priorities to the equation.
Where should you go from here?
Ultimately, we believe that healthcare should be more proactive, higher quality, and less expensive for everyone. But those characteristics can apply to any industry.
If you want to accelerate your company, we cannot recommend Automation Hub enough. We have partnered with lots of different companies over the years but have never seen anything quite like the UiPath technology suite.
The easiest way to begin or accelerate your own RPA journey is to start a free UiPath Automation Hub trial today. This will ensure you’re building your automation strategy from a shared repository built on the pillars of standards, support, advocacy, and innovation.
What will you build on top of these automation pillars to advance transformation in your healthcare organization?
