Faster throughput times of care referrals at specialized healthcare clinics

Use case

At the customer service department (CSD) at a healthcare clinic, healthcare referrals from general practitioners come in per email on a daily basis. Subsequently, a worker at the CSD has to process those referrals in their electronic patient record system, EMMA. After that, the worker uses the referral to check whether the patient is a known patient. If that is not the case, the patient is added to the electronic record, based on its social service number. Lastly, the worker must add the referral documents to the patient record as well.

The entire processing takes over 750 referrals a week, and those are all processed manually. The fact that each transaction has a lengthy throughput time, makes the complete process time consuming. This has the consequence that patients might not be addressed on a timely manner and that valuable contact time with the patient is lost.

Applied technologies

Robotic Process Automation

2

Months to ROI

2701

Hours saved anually

95%

Error reduction

200%

Increased time efficiency

Our solution

We created an RPA solution that constantly monitors the mailbox from the customer service department (CSD). When an email containing a referral comes in, the virtual employee reads the email and extracts the relevant information. It then chooses how much of all information is to be added to the electronic patient record of this respective patient. All these steps are performed in the background. Our robot was built to perform the following tasks:

is triggered manually at the office
reads and extracts healthcare referral from email
checks if patient exists in electronic patient record system (EMMA)
if not, adds patient to record system based on its social service number
adds referral documents to patient record

Our solution reduced a significant amount of the workload of the customer service department. Annually, 1701 hours are saved that now can be used for more value-adding tasks. Also, patients can now be helped 20 hours earlier. This greatly contributes to the patient experience.

Our RPA robot offers a solution that is effective, efficient and reliable. Healthcare workers can stop wasting time on administrative tasks and refocus on work that matters.

Integrated applications for this case