March 2024 Newsletter

Spring has sprung! Or at least that’s how it’s feeling in New England. As we prepare for sunshine and longer days, we’re also getting ready for out of office messages and vacation time. Often summer means missing team members and longer project timelines, maybe delays in processing or slower time to market. For whatever industry you may be in, robotic process automation may be your missing link to maintain performance while team members are away, or even while they’re at their desks.

Take a look at our case studies, podcasts, and webinars to see if RPA is the right fit for you. We can guarantee that it is!

Welcome to CAMP a podcast by CampTek Software where we'll cover all things automation and robotic process automation (RPA). You'll hear from various members of the CampTek team on topics such as Citizen Development, How to Prepare for a Scope Call, What RPA Can Mean for You, and so much more! Check out our first two episodes on YouTube, Linkedin, or Transistor!

Hear from Gretchen Hyslip, Director of Customer Operations, Bob DiSciullo, VP of Sales, and Dennis Stone, Senior Dev Ops Engineer, as they break down the importance of managed services in an automation project.

AI Journey 2024: Is RPA Needed Any Longer?

Years ago, when I started CampTek Software, I was on a roundtable with a group of practitioners and business leaders who were in the Automation space. We were having an open discussion around RPA, and each person spoke about where they or their company was in their adoption and use of the platform. Most indicated they were just getting started, had a fairly well-developed COE, or were somewhere in the middle. As we went around the quorum, one person indicated that his company had decided to “go right to AI and will skip RPA altogether.” I was astonished by the answer and have tried to figure out the thought process around this decision.

In a previous blog, I spoke about how AI and RPA are often confused, and now with more awareness and excitement around Chat GPT, Microsoft CoPilot, and AI Large Language Models. Everything is now classified as AI, even though in some cases it may be RPA. The truth of the matter is that RPA, at its core is a representation of years of Machine Learning Models. Today’s platforms like UiPath have a lot of AI embedded into their activities to increase reliability as they interact with applications on a Windows desktop. Each activity represents thousands of hours of development, testing, and use. These activities need to work 100% of the time, so it makes sense that they are refined, very similar to ML.

That’s all well and good, but is RPA needed any longer? The short answer is yes and yes and YES! The longer explanation is focused on several key areas to consider, in relation to AI.

1. The Data… AI needs ample data to provide its intelligence. RPA can help with this. To build an ML sufficient to accommodate the needs of a robust AI activity, there must be enough quality data the model can consume and begin making quality decisions from. So, one starts to think of where the real decisioning data lives, it’s in the applications that have been collecting it for years. In Healthcare particularly, there seem to be restrictions in both the modern EHR/EMRs and the older ones as well. The older applications have proprietary databases that are hard to pull from using typical query language, so the only way to get to the data is to pull it from the front end. To make matters worse, some of the leading “modern” vendors own or put restrictions on accessing the data without a lot of hoops to go through. This makes the task of collecting historical and real-time data hard. There is only so much that can be pulled from the back end, and sometimes it doesn’t line up. This is clearly something that RPA can help resolve as a near and long-term solution.

2. The Decisioning… RPA is fantastic at interacting with desktop applications that reside anywhere and in any form, (i.e. Citrix, Cloud, Windows, Character-based, Web, etc.). The use of any intelligent automation activity (i.e. GenAI, AI w/ LLM’s, Intelligent Document Processing) to be inherently useful will need to be orchestrated, activated, and used by an application. The application could be SAP, Epic, Salesforce, ServiceNow, some type of Low Code App, or any application on the desktop. How can you get the question asked by the user to the AI activity and its answer back to something that can act on this decision? RPA is how.

3. The Day to Day… We are already seeing significant traction of Microsoft CoPilot, Python-based RPA applications, and even at some point, UiPath AutoPilot. These next-generation applications will simplify the Citizen Developer or the Power User Experience. They are all powered by RPA and AI in some form. While these will be considered 1st gen tools, at some point, they are getting us closer to a dynamic learn-as-you-go experience where the tool is getting smarter with limited user instruction versus the contrary.
As I wrote previously, we are getting closer to where technology will work for humans versus humans working for technology.

Written by: Peter Camp, CTO & Founder

Challenge: A large healthcare provider needed to ramp up their automation strategy to offset labor instability and attrition. Currently the staff manually have to go out to payer portals, submit requests and check statuses of Prior Authorizations, sometimes multiple times. Through Task Mining AI (Artificial Intelligence) analysis, it was determined that staff were spending about 30 – 40% of their time submitting requests and checking the status for 19,000 prior authorizations per month.

Prior Authorization Requests: 3 bots processing prior authorization requests in 3 separate portals (EviCore, Magellan and UHC).

EviCore: 923 transactions per month
Magellan: 595 transactions per month
UHC: 7,063 transactions per month

Prior Authorization Statusing: 3 bots processing prior authorization statuses in 3 separate portals (EviCore, Magellan and UHC).

EviCore: 5,536 transactions per month
Magellan: 3,572 transactions per month
UHC: 986 transactions per month

Solution: RPA bots are a much more accurate and effective solution to verify the status of patient health authorizations, RPA bots can repeatedly check requests under review for status changes and updates.

CampTek Software was engaged because of its healthcare and Epic experience. Through task mining, AI models were created, and results were reported back to the customer with enormous success. The next phase of design and build all occurred in a brief time. The bot now in production includes business rules, exception handling and daily reporting functionality. It is also supported by CampTek as an ongoing managed service solution for the provider.

The Bot is now saving 2,696 FTE (full-time employees) hours per month or 32,352 hours (about 3 and a half years) per year. The FTE capacity gain is 17 FTEs (full-time employees), and the ROI (Return on Investment) is $1,085,000 per year.

As part of the solution, CampTek Software also provides Customizable Executive Dashboards for each bot in production so that customers can see powerful and actionable analytics data on their automation success.

Example Executive Dashboard data visualizations

Visual ROIs of both Macro and Micro views
FTE Hours saved
Cost Savings
Runtime hours
Bot utilization
Trending and Reporting

CampTek Software provides Customizable Executive Dashboards for each bot so that customers can see powerful and actionable analytics data on their automation success.

CONTENT

Additional Resources

AI Journey 2024: Is RPA Needed Any Longer?

Revenue Cycle Prior Authorization Case Study

Real RPA Case Studies, Real Verifiable Solutions

Industry: Healthcare, RCM

Provider Systems: Epic

Payer Portals: eviCore, United Healthcare, Magellan

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