A Customer Story
Michigan Medicine Reimagines EPIC with RPA
Client Overview
Michigan Medicine is a premier, highly-ranked academic medical center and award-winning health care system with state-of-the-art facilities. Michigan Medicine includes the UM Hospitals and Health Centers; the UM Medical School and its Faculty Group Practice.
The Challenge
Michigan Medicine needed to find ways to improve efficiency and cut overall costs by automating high volume tasks, while maintaining the same number of employees.
They found a specific area that would allow them to be able to become more efficient would be through their Epic systems, their healthcare software. While Epic has some automation functionality, there’s a point where this it’s limited, which is where RPA comes in.
RPA would be the answer to Michigan Medicine’s initiative to help cut down on administrative tasks, especially after seeing that implementing it would be quick as well as cost-effective. They partnered with us because of proven expertise in helping organizations effectively utilize RPA.
Our Innovative Solution
To conquer Michigan Medicine’s initiative for more efficient processes, we extended their Epic systems with robotic process automation (RPA) in three key areas: hospital billing, professional billing and anesthesia coding.
With hospital billing, staff had to manually handle and mail all secondary paper claims going into Epic. We would transform this process to be more efficient by building RPA bots to handle most of the manual work including printing out the claims themselves ready to be mailed. This process would save Michigan Medicine 45 hours per month.
Another process that was taking up a lot of time was professional billing, which has done in the steps below:
- Staff would have to find patient chart
2. Find the associated EKG from the cardiology tab
3. If there was a doctor indicated as Authorizing provide, staff would enter that and resolve edit
4. If there was a “dummy” provider, they would have to attempt to determine referring provider by looking into the encounter notes.
We automated this process by having bots look over the EKGs and pull the authorizing provider listed. If there is no authorizing provider the bot will transfer this to the billers who previously worked on the edit to fix this. This would save Michigan 22.5 hours per month.
Lastly, anesthesia coding requires transcribing data from Centricity, an anesthesia application, over to Epic. This means entering a great amount of data, taking up a lot of time. With RPA, the bots transcribed the information, allowing the codes to only need to focus on diagnosis and anesthesia code. This saved Michigan Medicine 116 hours per month.
Thanks to RPA, Michigan Medicine was able to increase security and scale their infrastructure seamlessly without breaking the bank!
Technology Used:
- EAutomation Anywhere RPA
- EEpic Systems
- ECentricity
Did you know 60% of RPA projects fail?
Seems shocking, right? And it is! The high failure rate comes from poor planning due to not dedicating time to learn RPA, assessing the right processes, evaluating the worth of a process, and determining how RPA fits within existing IT infrastructure.
Let us help you identify and validate which processes are great candidates for RPA. Contact us today to start your automation journey on the right path.