Dive Brief:
- By 2023, half of U.S. healthcare providers will dedicate resources to deploy robotic process automation (RPA), according to a projection from Gartner. Currently, only 5% of the healthcare sector uses RPA platforms.
- The effects of the coronavirus pandemic are increasing pressure on on healthcare decision makers to optimize costs and make the most of existing resources, heightening interest in RPA adoption, according to Gartner. For the healthcare sector, the focus of RPA adoption is on tasks such as IT help desk, physician credentialing or assessing insurance eligibility.
- Over the next three years, 20% of patient interactions will "involve some form of AI enablement within clinical or nonclinical processes," present in just 4% of interactions taking place today, according to Gartner.
Dive Insight:
The COVID-19 pandemic is impacting finances in the healthcare sector, as hospitals entered a crisis running on relatively thin margins. In its wake, cash-crunched decision makers will seek to focus on technology that helps maximize efficiency.
"Cost optimization is a consistently recurring theme among healthcare providers," said Anurag Gupta, research VP at Gartner, in a press release. "The money that RPA saves by not having to spend as much on an unreformed process translates into cash that is available for front-end clinical functions."
RPA adoption that delivers on its promises of efficiency starts with identifying repetitive, low-impact work that acts as a drag on high-value resources.
Before the pandemic, 41% of healthcare provider CIOs were already navigating funding constraints, according to a Gartner survey. RPA adoption promises to "help reduce these operating cost pressures that sit on the top of healthcare provider CIOs' list of challenges," Gupta said.
In the face of further economic contraction, interest in technology that can expand productivity is rising across sectors. One-quarter CFOs say they anticipate RPA spending to increase as a response to the effects of the pandemic. The manufacturing sector will increase its reliance on automation in the face of operational disruption, Supply Chain Dive reports.
Complexity can derail RPA adoption at the enterprise level. Three in 10 projects fail because the intended automation processes are misunderstood, or there's not enough understanding of the underlying automation tools.
