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Through a long-standing collaborative relationship, Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) and Huron have collaborated to address revenue cycle challenges and test innovative, forward-thinking performance improvement practices. As a part of these efforts, OHSU and Huron worked together to implement robotic process automation (RPA) in two key business offices.

Challenge

OHSU continually innovates to deliver high-quality care and improve its patient and employee experiences. By investing in its digital workforce with RPA, the organization sought to position itself to better serve patients and create a more efficient and productive work environment for employees. Specifically, OHSU sought to deploy RPA to improve operational efficiency with payor claims processing.

Approach

OHSU and Huron collaborated to build internal resources and expertise for use of RPA. The first steps were to prioritize processes for automation, rapidly implement automation solutions and build a foundation to increase its digital workforce.

Increase productivity and efficiency of insurance claims. The team used predefined criteria to select workflows suitable for automation that would provide significant return on investment (ROI).

Claim statuses for hospital and professional billing work were selected for automation due to their high volume and the repetitive and routine processes required for resolution. Using UiPath technology, OHSU and Huron designed and implemented automations that optimized the revenue cycle process of obtaining claim status updates from two large national insurance companies. Production-ready automations were implemented for each business office.

Automation resulted in increased productivity and improved process efficiency, including faster claims processing and reduction of claims backlogs. Labor hours saved through automation allowed staff to focus on more complex or revenue-generating tasks.

Scale the digital workforce. The foundation established in the two automations will enable future automations by increasing OHSU’s digital workforce footprint. OHSU also achieved a scalable environment in which automations were built on top of what was previously developed at reduced time and cost.

Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) is an academic health center providing over 1 million patient visits annually. The public organization is dedicated to advancing health sciences.