Intelligent Automation Elevates Staff Productivity and Customer Care
Serving more than two million customers, a leading U.S. healthcare equipment and service provider sought to maximize operational efficiency, boost productivity and improve patient satisfaction.
NTT DATA implemented a suite of Intelligent Automation solutions to transform the organization’s operational workflows, resulting in more quick and effective claim and order processing — and expedited new patient onboarding. The NTT DATA Nucleus Intelligent Enterprise Platform, Nucleus Command Center and Nucleus Virtual Resource Manager were key solution components.
Business Needs
With the vital task of providing medical equipment and services for respiratory therapy, obstructive sleep apnea treatment and negative pressure wound therapy, this leading healthcare company knew interactions with its two million patients must be timely and accurate. But manually processing 2,000 equipment and service orders per day and 10,000 claims submissions each week hindered service excellence and business growth.
The company collaborated with NTT DATA to improve workflows, reduce operations costs, and make the patient experience better.
The company looked to Intelligent Automation as the key to that transformation. Intelligent automation, including robotic process automation (RPA) and robotic desktop automation (RDA), relies on software bots — robotic assistants — that emulate human activities. The bots perform repeatable, rules-based tasks to automate business processes and free employees to focus on higher-value work.
Outcomes
- Reduces labor required by 20 seconds per order or claim
- Frees 75+ FTEs from repetitive manual claim and order processing
- Consolidates 50 screens to one for greater call center productivity
- Launches an intelligent automation Center of Excellence
Intelligent automation increases productivity and efficiency for employees and provides an overall better experience for patients.
Solution
Power up the bots
Using Automation 360, a cloud-based RPA platform from Automation Anywhere, software bots automated over 50 business processes controlling order processing and claims authorizations. The bots have freed up over 75 employees, allowing them to focus on innovation projects.
Command Center keeps a watchful eye
Those bots are controlled by over 100 production bot runner applications installed on a single control room server. NTT DATA’s Command Center oversees and optimizes bot productivity. A dashboard measures bot performance with proactive monitoring, real-time analytics and key performance indicators. It also keeps a fully auditable record to ensure HIPAA compliance.
Automation opens the door for rapid growth
Beyond automating business processes, the company’s RPA transformation gives it the power to scale business growth rapidly. For example, after acquiring a Durable Medical Equipment company in 2021, the company had to integrate 30,000 patients into existing customer databases. These RPA systems helped onboard and integrate all 30,000 patients in a single day – a task that would have been impossible to accomplish manually.
RDA drives a better call center for customers and the business
The company also applied intelligent automation to its call centers, a vital service lifeline used by patients for order fulfillment, product information, equipment services and billings. RDA tools from Pegasystems increased the productivity of the call centers and improved customer service. It leveraged RDA to consolidate 50 information screens used by call center agents into a single customer information screen. That holistic view of a customer helps agents manage calls more efficiently and improves their opportunities for upselling.
In addition, the RDA platform passes the data from the customer information screen into its legacy applications. That gives team members in 290 service locations visibility into new orders and provides convenient links to supporting tools. Meanwhile, back-office users can monitor billing status and use data filtering capabilities to increase efficiency.
Overall, RDA significantly improves customer relationship management, bringing simplified data access with more data integrity. The organization’s RDA delivers an estimated labor savings of 20 seconds per order—a significant saving with 2,000 orders processed each day.
Low-code tools streamline business processes
The Pegasystems Healthcare Industry Framework (HCIF) and its underlying platform, PegaRules Process Commander (PRPC), streamlined the intake of customer orders. HCIF and PRPC form a foundation for creating business process automations faster and with minimal coding. PRPC automated and simplified order intake by developing a new responsive user interface and dashboard tools and integrating its order processing with external payer and provider systems for further efficiencies.
The company leveraged NTT DATA’s Application Development & Modernization services to develop a mobile app for delivery drivers that improves customer service. First, the mobile app informs a driver of products to deliver and enables digital capture of a customer’s signature. Then, the app completes the order via automation to eliminate keystroking and manual errors.
As a result of these automations, the organization streamlined the entire lifecycle of an order, from intake through delivery. PRPC’s low-code capabilities and integration with agile and DevOps practices deliver the power to respond quickly to any new business requirements.
An intelligent automation Center of Excellence
Intelligent automation has delivered significant improvements in productivity, operational efficiency, and business agility. That success is its first step towards creating an intelligent automation Center of Excellence.
Thanks the move to intelligent automation, the company can now focus on unique needs of the patients, be more efficient, and can continue to deliver an exceptional experience for its patients, employees, and the business.
About This Case Study
A leading medical supply company worked with NTT DATA to implement intelligent automation, RPA, RDA and application development to transform employee processes and the patient experience.