Two of the most common technologies used in healthcare IT to automate business processes are workload automation and robotic process automation (RPA). So, how are they different? Workload automation and job scheduling solutions help healthcare organizations solve complex problems by taking care of the most labor-intensive tasks. This gives IT the ability to coordinate and organize workflows across the whole system, helping ensure each task has the resources it needs.

Robotic process automation for healthcare, on the other hand, is best at managing individual repetitive business processes. For example, robotic process automation software can be “trained” to gather data, complete forms or create user accounts. So, if a healthcare employee needs to upload a daily log, and import the data into a spreadsheet, the employee can automate this task with a robotic process automation tool.

Healthcare systems are very complex – they run thousands of applications that never stop, from the emergency rooms to intensive care units (ICU) to accounting. This is where automation software is playing an increasingly critical role in the success of these healthcare systems.

Automation solutions are useful in performing repetitive tasks more effectively than humans. This automation frees up healthcare professionals to focus on the areas where they can add real value, such as offering a better patient experience, and quality of service, all at reduced operational costs for the organization.

As healthcare professionals look to automate their business systems and healthcare processes, here are some of the primary uses of automated systems in healthcare:

• - Helping run audit reports: Audit reports are a hugely time-consuming, administrative function. It’s a tedious task for IT to focus on, but healthcare automation tools can help streamline all the data to run a report without the need for manual supervision. This consolidation of information drives efficiencies for hospitals with labor-intensive tasks like healthcare management and revenue accounting.

• - Establishing workflows for doctors using a tablet or computer: Nowadays, most doctors carry a tablet to revisit data on patients they’re seeing. Healthcare workflow automation helps with the backend of self-service buttons by performing a desired action with just one click. For example, when ordering a prescription for a patient, a doctor can submit the order with a tablet, and a seamless interface will initiate the required approval and audit processes.
• - Streamlining processes in an emergency: When patients need emergency transportation via helicopter or ambulance, time is of the essence. By quickly allocating information and providing system instructions to get to the proper channels, automation ensures the emergency call is answered as quickly as possible.

SMA Technologies’ OpCon workload automation platform helps medical and healthcare enterprises transform their businesses, providing better patient care, with greater operational efficiencies. Our healthcare automation solution offers cross-functional, bi-modal orchestration and hybrid cloud infrastructure to boost our clients’ business agility while delivering automation at scale.

For healthcare organizations, OpCon helps best in the following ways:

• Reducing operational costs by streamlining key business processes
• Scaling solutions up or down to meet business needs
• Providing stability and reliability to ensure all incidents are handled quickly

One of the main benefits the OpCon automation tool offers the healthcare industry is keeping systems operational and reliable around-the-clock, 365 days a year. This is essential given the important nature of providing medical assistance, particularly for critical emergency medical treatment facilities and trauma units. OpCon automation solutions are bringing cost efficiency and security to healthcare organizations around the world, from a major health sciences university in the Texas Medical Center to IT Ops for several large hospitals across Europe.

CHU Nancy, a regional university hospital in France, is using OpCon workload automation to reduce costs, and modernize its core IT system. OpCon workload automation’s high-availability structure ensured the most critical hospital services continued to operate at all times during the upgrade process. After a server incident, OpCon delivered disaster recovery by switching critical systems to a failover server automatically, and all without interrupting operations. OpCon also supports patient privacy and data security for hospitals. Using TLS (Transport Layer Security) between the outcome server and all its agents, OpCon avoids the security risks of plain text passwords and fully encrypts all data, one of the many reasons OpCon is the ideal automation solution for the healthcare industry.