Healthcare organisations in Singapore are seeking innovative ways to ensure that employees are equipped to deal with the ever-changing nature of the industry and to provide quality care in the face of staffing constraints, heavy workloads on the workforce, and competing demands.
At SingHealth – the largest group of healthcare institutions in Singapore – we harness technology to alleviate administrative workload challenges to future-proof our workforce, allowing our people to concentrate on caring for their patients.
As part of that initiative, we have introduced robotic process automation (RPA), a digital solution that relieves workers from manual, repetitive and rule-based tasks.
‘Employing RPA optimises the submission process, especially when managing substantial adjustments’
RPA works by replicating various human actions, integrating with different applications and software systems. These include file and date manipulation, data extraction and transaction processing.
Stakeholder collaboration
At SingHealth Finance, a team led by Singapore General Hospital (SGH) and KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital (KKH) staff use Blue Prism, an enterprise RPA solution, for payment posting, billing and claims processing. This has enabled the automation of processes such as claims under MediSave, Singapore’s national medical savings scheme.
Under the MediSave maternity package, for example, the RPA bot extracts relevant billing information incurred during antenatal visits with preset parameters such as obstetric speciality and automatically enters it into the appropriate fields in the delivery cases. It also performs validation checks on the extracted data to ensure accuracy and completeness.
In preparation for the roll-out of RPA, SingHealth’s business office worked with Blue Prism and Synapxe – Singapore’s national healthtech agency – to better understand the needs of staff and the competencies required to support adoption.
Over 18 months, workshops, discussion meetings, user acceptance testing, on-the-job training and development activities were carried out to ensure that staff understood how to incorporate RPA into their work processes.
RPA implementation has helped to decrease stress levels and increase job satisfaction for staff
‘Employing RPA optimises the claims submission process, especially when managing the substantial adjustments to bills,’ says Lye Foon Mei, senior patient service associate executive in KKH’s business office. A large volume of MediSave claims require the resubmission of bills, and RPA can do this with a high level of accuracy, minimising data entry errors and validating the data. ‘As the time required for manual submissions is minimised, it allows me to allocate my attention to other responsibilities such as planning, user access testing and implementing improvement projects and process optimisation in billing and claims processing.’
Job satisfaction
The benefits of RPA implementation in SingHealth’s business office are apparent, with an estimated 4,300 work hours saved per year in payment posting and claims submission and resubmission. It has also helped to decrease stress levels and increase job satisfaction for staff, who now accomplish more in less time.
Because they spend less time on the tedious, repetitive and mundane tasks that are now delegated to RPA, they have more time to focus on the more challenging and rewarding aspects of their job. They can develop new skills and expertise in areas that are more strategic or specialised, follow training programmes and courses, and participate in projects that enhance their professional growth and career advancement prospects, as well as put more effort into innovation and process improvement initiatives.
‘90% of the workload has been lifted from our team’
Before RPA, staff had to check data and ensure its accuracy for the submission of MediSave claims, and a submissions deadline posed particular challenges when the volume of claim submissions was high. Following the RPA implementation, the resubmission job can be scheduled to run outside office hours without any staff intervention at all.
‘Monitoring submission deadlines and determining submission types used to demand our constant attention,’ says Khng Li Juan, business office executive for patient financial services at SGH. ‘While some aspects still require manual intervention, 90% of the workload has been lifted from our team. With the saved time, we can focus on urgent tasks and refining the bot to achieve complete process automation.’
Fears relieved
There was initial staff scepticism. RPA was a new technology which the team had yet to test and implement, and there was concern that the solution might not work as intended. Rigorous user access testing before implementation resolved those fears, and staff then embraced the new process.
‘Staff started to appreciate that RPA has helped to cut down on the time spent toggling between two billing systems to extract, for example, the MediSave maternity package claims amount accurately,’ says Shirley Loh, assistant manager for patient financial services at SGH.
Moving forward, there are plans to roll out RPA projects to more SingHealth institutions, including SNEC, NCCS, NDCS and SHP, enabling these institutions to benefit from automation capabilities. The adoption of RPA in SingHealth is one of the many ways we continue to seek improvements to our daily operations, for the betterment of both the patient and staff experience.
