A NEW ERA OF OUTPATIENT SERVICE DELIVERY - TRANSFORMING THE OUTPATIENT EXPERIENCE WITH INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION - Blue Prism
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A NEW ERA OF OUTPATIENT SERVICE DELIVERY TRANSFORMING THE OUTPATIENT EXPERIENCE WITH INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION
A New Era of Outpatient Service Delivery OPTIMISING THE OUTPATIENT EXPERIENCE It’s been widely acknowledged for many years that the traditional one-model-fits-all approach to outpatient care is incapable of meeting growing demand. Although outpatient care has seen positive changes over the past few years, improvements are being constrained by a climate of increasing skills shortages, budget deficits and inefficient, disconnected, operating environments. Healthcare leaders are key to addressing these challenges and driving wide-scale improvements in outpatient care by embracing an evolving digital technology ecosystem, underpinned by the power of a dynamic and flexible digital workforce. In this eBook, we’ll explore the key challenges, opportunities and real-life examples that help to demonstrate how this ecosystem can be applied to your healthcare organizations, so that your staff can do more of what really counts: delivering outstanding outpatient care. 2 blueprism.com
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A New Era of Outpatient Service Delivery
THE CHALLENGE
Global healthcare organizations have made real advancements in recent years
to improve patient care, and the global pandemic has further accelerated this
transformation, especially within outpatient departments. In the UK, we’ve seen
new services launched in a matter of weeks and more treatments managed
outside of hospitals, from GP referrals and e-consultations to remote diagnostics
and monitoring.
However, the current delivery of outpatient services is significant in its scale,
complexity and cost, with outpatient appointments and pathways often cutting
across disparate clinical settings and multiple diagnostic services.
These operating environments are also limited by cumbersome
processes, poor quality data, disconnected legacy IT infrastructure
and rigid structures.
These factors negatively impact the patient experience, forcing them to
navigate overly complex booking processes and endure long waiting lists for
appointments, frequent changes to appointment times, and delays to see a
specialist. This experience also has an indirect effect on healthcare staff, giving
rise to dissatisfaction and burnout, with clinicians increasingly caught between
the frustrations of patients demanding more responsive treatment and the
inflexibility of the current system. And for private healthcare providers, the
outlook isn’t much brighter, as these inefficiencies have the double-edged
sword of leading to unhappy customers, increased churn and ultimately lost
recurring revenue.
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A New Era of Outpatient Service Delivery
THE SOLUTION: DOING MORE FOR YOUR
OUTPATIENTS WITH LESS
Improving the outpatient experience is dependent on enabling more effective, streamlined patient pathways. Central
to this is cutting wait times, making care more transparent and giving clinicians more time to spend with patients. To
achieve this, services must be delivered much smarter, faster, and more efficiently than ever before.
And to sustain improvements, there must be a laser focus How it works
on how any additional financial, human and technological
Trained and run by non-technical people through a collaborative
resources are best employed, too.
platform, these digital workers perform collaborative, data-driven,
end-to-end work across a typical healthcare operating environment
The good news is that these seemingly impossible goals are already made up of multiple operating environments with complex, disjointed,
being tackled by healthcare organizations across the world with the and difficult-to-modify legacy systems and manual workflows, at
help of intelligent automation. Whether you’re looking to introduce unprecedented speed, accuracy and integrity, 24x7.
new technologies into your ecosystem, or make the most of what you
already have, Blue Prism intelligent digital workers are ready to give The unique universal interoperability capabilities of the digital
a helping hand and ensure that, at your core, you’re operating in the workforce ensures that all current and future technologies can be
smartest, most efficient way possible. utilized without any form of coding, system integration, major process
changes or mass data migration. This seamless connectivity with
Blue Prism intelligent digital workers are super organized, multitasking systems, cognitive tools, applications and technologies, including AI,
software robots that work within your existing systems, technology machine learning, OCR, and Blue Prism’s Digital Exchange ecosystem
and applications to automate business processes. of ready-made automations, is all available to non-technical users.
Ultimately, this means that all digitally driven work transformation
that would traditionally be cost and resource prohibitive is now easily
achievable.
In the next section, we’ll look at the real-world examples of how these
skills are being used across the globe.
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A New Era of Outpatient Service Delivery THE PUBLIC SECTOR OUTPATIENT EXPERIENCE According to the Royal College of Physicians, a quarter of UK doctors revealed that on any given day 10-20% of their new patients didn’t need to attended an outpatient clinic; and 28% add that 10-20% of their follow-up patients could have been seen using an alternative to face-to-face consultation. However, there is a clear ambition from the NHS, both Addressing the monthly budget deficit is another major nationally and locally, to offer a streamlined digitally issue that was highlighted in the Lord Carter Report, which enabled outpatient service for patients and an expectation revealed the NHS spends £5 billion on productivity and that it will need to invest to deliver this. The NHS Long- efficiency, equating to between 6-11% of trust income. Term Plan published last year, identified the use of new Clearly, improving productivity is also one of the biggest technology and collaborative services with an emphasis on opportunities for NHS savings, especially by reducing a prevention and a personalized service for patients, which is reliance on agency staff. crucial to both the future of the NHS and patient outcomes. 8 blueprism.com
A New Era of Outpatient Service Delivery
THE FOR-PROFIT
OUTPATIENT
EXPERIENCE
The bottom line with for-profit and not-for-profit
healthcare organizations is a better outpatient
experience not only equals better care, but
better profitability, too .
With evermore savvy and demanding patients, the
outpatient experience is important. Patients must feel their
care is the highest priority and that they’re best supported
in the process to ensure they experience the greatest
value, highest quality treatments available, and as swiftly
as possible.
This means directing patients to the right location and right
provider for the right procedure and accurately delivering
all the approvals required from payers. Those forward-
thinking organizations that improve the outpatient patient
experience will sustain and grow revenue cycles; those that
don’t will experience patients moving to competitors, not
only taking away recurring revenue, but also introducing the
risk of brand reputation damage.
blueprism.com 9A New Era of Outpatient Service Delivery
Taking action across the NHS
Over 52 trusts are taking action using Blue Prism’s
intelligent digital workforce. They’re not only collaboratively
designing, drawing and ‘publishing’ new ways of
automated working, but uniquely sharing, improving and
reusing these automated work assets - anytime, anywhere
to compound value.
A key enabler to this has been the NHS Digital Exchange, a
collaborative, private platform that allows intra-trust sharing
of pre-built automation work in a safe and secure way,
without any costs. New processes are being created in mere
weeks that previously would have taken IT programs and
vast teams of people months or even years to complete.
Go to the use cases section to take a look at these
digital workers in action!
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Taking action in the United States
Despite major initiatives such as moving from paper to
electronic patient records, a lack of interoperability remains
a barrier to providing efficient outpatient services. With
multiple systems and processes operating in silos, there are
simply too many data points to consider.
There are as many as 700 vendors of Electronic Health
Record systems that often don’t talk to each other, meaning
providers still routinely resort to transferring data by hand
or fax. Unsurprisingly, with all this manual handling and
lack of integration, *1 in 5 patients have noticed an error in
their electronic data and nearly half are concerned it may
negatively affect care.
For example, as a patient moves from a physician’s chair to
blood tests and hospital treatment, their information moves
through multiple systems, applications and organizations.
Each of these produces a separate record and data for the
patient, increasing the risk of delays and disjointed care and
ultimately threatening patient satisfaction.
To achieve better outcomes for payers, providers and
patients alike, many hospitals are doing all they can to give
more time for frontline care and creating a patient-centric
approach to their healthcare. Intelligent automation is
already helping to free physicians from repetitive processes,
managing medical records more efficiently while enabling
the integration and analysis of patient data.
In the next section, we’ll demonstrate how digital
workers are being used to meet these requirements.
blueprism.com 11A New Era of Outpatient Service Delivery
DIGITAL WORKERS IN ACTION
Automating Referrals Diagnostic Tracking
Great Western Hospitals is automating its ERS Gastroenterology Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust are also taking steps to improve
referrals to streamline this service, while enabling staff to devote their outpatient services. As with many healthcare organizations,
more time to patient care. Digital workers deliver each referral by operations were being constrained by inconsistent processes, poor
swiftly operating across multiple systems, searching, processing, and data quality and a lack of systems integration, with staff performing
updating related patient data across multiple sources in seconds. With time-consuming, high-volume, manual tasks to fill the gaps. Blue
more than 2,000 referrals being processed each week, this compares Prism’s digital workforce is now working with staff members to
dramatically with 10 minutes taken by a staff member, so the potential automate key processes that include diagnostic tracking, appointment
compounded savings and associated patient benefits of accelerated cancellations, referrals and attachments from eRS and self-referrals.
response times are considerable. Wide-ranging benefits are expected including improved patient
outcomes, reduced clinical risk and far less waste.
*Referrals that would take staff 10 minutes to
complete are now processed in seconds
The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust is also seeing a major
acceleration of eReferral processing, using digital workers that are
saving human resources and time. University Hospitals of Morecambe
Bay NHS Trust also uses intelligent automation to help patients book
follow up appointments, so everyone accurately and swiftly receives
tailored communications, confirming each step of their treatment.
With 600,000 yearly bookings, there was no way staff could
proactively or manually manage that level of personalized
communication.
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OPTIMIZING PATIENT INTAKE
Pre-appointment coordination is one area that requires improvement. It’s not uncommon for
patients to forget an appointment or for key details to be missed by the provider. In order to create
the best patient experience possible, each step must be made as easy as possible.
Mount Sinai Health System
Mount Sinai Health System wants to ensure that patient Administrators addressed this challenge by using Interact,
experiences are as smooth and comforting as possible. Blue Prism’s intuitive collaboration platform, as part of a
Even though the healthcare provider already delivered public web interface, enabling patients to enter their data
exceptional care, certain sections of the journey didn’t and documentation before arriving for an appointment.
quite stack up, namely its pre-appointment required Today, digital workers pre-populate form data into various
documentation. The process required the patient to bring hospital systems so that it’s all collected simultaneously and
a host of information pertinent to their medical history, ready for use by physicians and consultants upon patient
medications and even medical records from other provider arrival. This has helped to eliminate the time that patients
visits. And once at the provider’s office or hospital, they’d spent filling out paper forms on arrival, and increased the
have to fill out even more forms before receiving treatment, number of patients that consultants can see each day. This
taking up valuable time and likely creating frustration with self-registration approach also avoids the errors that creep
the process. in through manual data entry and ensures that hospital
systems are accurately updated.
blueprism.com 13A New Era of Outpatient Service Delivery
Better revenue cycle management
In the U.S, evidence-based healthcare providers are faced with Conclusion
challenges that drive up costs in both medical fees and penalties. Global healthcare organizations are on an exciting automation
Most practices, hospitals and healthcare systems are struggling to journey to increase patient satisfaction and streamline time-
optimize their revenue cycle in the face of constant reimbursement consuming outpatient care activities. But they’ll need to achieve
and technological change. The transition to pay-for-performance this in a climate of constant change and ever-evolving demands,
is putting pressure on providers to deliver proof-of-value-based and with increasingly constrained and disconnected resources.
healthcare in order to receive maximum reimbursements. The key
Now is the time to re-evaluate ways of working better by
here is that patients want transparency and a process that is crystal
applying the most advanced, trusted intelligent automation
clear every step of the way. Delays and inaccuracies lead to higher
capabilities across your front-, middle- and back-office
labor costs and bottom-line deductions.
operations. By implementing a digital workforce—one that works
Intelligent automation provides a viable solution by using digital collaboratively with your human workforce, your healthcare
workers to keep patients informed every step and reduce their organization will experience a new type of connected enterprise,
financial burden. By performing work with total accuracy and much across the patient life cycle, where information flows freely
faster than the manual way of monitoring, digital workers remove the across front- and back-office functions and between patient and
risks of delays, errors and any potential losses, too. At Mass General treatment providers.
Brigham, digital workers are performing revenue cycle operations to
Seize the advantage to work faster, smarter, more efficiently and
complete insurance verifications, eligibility-of-benefits verifications
safely with Blue Prism.
and request referrals for all scheduled patient appointments.
Key steps for success
For any intelligent automation program to be sustainable and
successful in clinical environments, it needs to be strategically aligned
to key goals such as accelerating the optimization of outpatient
care. Gaining executive sponsorship from the onset will help you to
sustain wider-scale, long-term adoption. Managing future demand
for automation also means communicating the benefits across your
healthcare organization, engaging with the wider teams, breaking
down silos and educating your staff about the potential of intelligent
automation so they’re encouraged to seek process improvement
opportunities.
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About Blue Prism
Blue Prism is the global leader in intelligent
automation for the enterprise, transforming the way
work is done. At Blue Prism, we have users in over 170
countries and more than 2,000 businesses, including
Fortune 500 and public sector organizations, that are
creating value with new ways of working, unlocking
efficiencies, and returning millions of hours of work
back into their businesses. Our intelligent digital
workforce is smart, secure, scalable and accessible to
all; freeing up humans to re-imagine work. To learn
more visit www.blueprism.com and follow us on
Twitter @blue_prism and on LinkedIn.
© 2021 Blue Prism Limited. “Blue Prism”, the “Blue Prism” logo and Prism device are either trademarks
or registered trademarks of Blue Prism Limited and its affiliates. All Rights Reserved. Outpatient-Service-Delivery-brochure-260121-ch
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