Automation has become crucial in the revenue cycle as organizations deal with challenges posed by COVID-19. Terms like RPA, AI, and BI have become interchangeable and innovations such as ChatGPT have signalled a shift towards streamlining clinical documentation, aiding decision-making, and alleviating administrative burdens.
For revenue cycle departments and hospitals to compete, automation must be embraced now. This involves efficiency, cost savings, ROI, scaling, networking with other leading organizations, and securing executive support. Implementation requires dedicated teams and a phased approach, beginning with the identification of pain points in the revenue cycle and brainstorming solutions. Initiatives can then be started, tested, measured, refined, and expanded.
Revenue cycle technology, along with regulatory guidelines and payer rules, is constantly evolving. In order to adapt, organizations must enhance their knowledge base to speed up training, improve onboarding, and mitigate errors.
Building the automation pipeline requires workflows with minimal build but maximum benefit. Examples include basic payment posting workflows, insurance verification, account adjudication, and vendor file processing. Workflows can then be demonstrated to key leaders for brainstorming.
Key leaders in the revenue cycle must be identified and involved in automation. Staff must also buy-in to the idea and understand that automation is not about replacing them, but about extending workflow capacity, augmenting staff, and optimizing processes.
After obtaining executive and staff buy-in, it is necessary to manage expectations. Dedicated automation build teams should be incorporated within the revenue cycle as official partners. The use of automation software platforms and specialized third-party developers can aid scalability.
To demonstrate the value of automation, evidence of time and cost savings, ROI, and future build, testing, and implementation dates should be shared. A business case template may also be helpful in documenting processes and benefits.
The future will involve a scalability framework and new insight creation. Vendor platforms can monitor end-users in live workflows to identify the most efficient processes. These insights can be used to capture the knowledge of high-performing employees, thus mitigating risks associated with daily staffing management.
In conclusion, automation is no longer optional, but a current necessity. Organizations have to leverage the efficiencies, cost savings, and ROI that automation offers in order to move from a concept to actual implementation. This not only mitigates current issues like employee turnover and an aging workforce, but also future-proofs the organization by setting the foundation for constant learning and adaptation.
