Robotic process automation in healthcare is nothing like BostonDynamics’ dog robot or meal-carrying drones. Instead, we’re talking about ingenious bots — or pre-programmed software agents — that inhabit accounting, insurance, laboratory information, and
patient engagement systems to name a few.
Feeding off structured data, which is stored in databases and may span patient demographics, names, addresses, and financial information, such bots execute rule-based, repetitive tasks the way human workers would.
In other words, the RPA solutions prevalent in the healthcare industry can be described as software that orchestrates other applications and performs tedious back-office tasks on its own, thus freeing healthcare workers’ time for diagnostic work and meaningful doctor-patient interactions. In particular, intelligent software agents are good at processing transactions, manipulating data, triggering responses, and conversing with internal and external IT systems.