“We initiated an automation program to address critical people-related issues, including employee attrition, labor costs, and work accuracy. Reskilling staff and enhancing their quality of life were also important factors.

Our team dedicated significant time to researching automation options, vendor partnerships, and the practices of peer organizations. We wanted to determine if it was feasible to handle these initiatives in-house. Ultimately, we are confident in our ability to manage a successful automation program that will address these issues and more.”

“In general, the organization has been very supportive of the program. We always planned on having the program report through the revenue cycle to ensure that it was aligned with the business's goals and objectives. However, we knew that we would need to work closely with our IT department. There was some concern that our IT department would have to handle more work, such as infrastructure requests, as a result of the program. We addressed this concern by developing a plan for managing the additional workload with our IT department.”

“As I mentioned earlier, our program reports up through the revenue cycle. Kim Davis, Senior Director of Revenue Services, is our project champion. She is responsible for ensuring that the program is aligned with the overall goals of the business.

The program falls under Revenue Services Decision Support, which I manage. This means that I am responsible for ensuring that the program is delivering the desired results. I also oversee process improvement and analytics for all the operations in the revenue cycle. This ensures that we are continuously identifying opportunities for improvement and that we are using data to make informed decisions.”

“Here are three pieces of advice:

Build strong vendor relationships: The vendor you choose will be a critical partner in your automation journey. Make sure to choose a vendor that is a good fit for your organization and that can meet your specific needs. For example, we were able to learn from the UiPath implementation team as they built our first automation. Tarpon has been so useful for our team in developing our actual program.

Do the training. It is important to train your staff on the basics of RPA, as well as the specific platform that you will be using. The time we spent understanding the technology and how it can be applied has really helped.

Focus on process improvement upstream. Before you start automating, take the time to identify the processes that would be the best fit for RPA. You should also make sure that the processes are well-defined and repeatable.”

“We used our longstanding, monthly Discovery Workgroup to prioritize automation ideas. The workgroup is composed of revenue cycle and IT leaders, and it allows for shared prioritization of many initiatives.

More specifically, our team created a tool to prioritize automation ideas. The tool took into account important factors such as: volume per week, minutes per task, number of departments the workflow touches, impact on core KPIs (weighted), and cash cycle times, among others. The tool then assigned a score to each idea and we selected the automations that produced the highest scores.

We felt that it was important to take as much bias out of the process as possible. It also gave our team a common language from which to work. I believe it allows us to identify the most important automation opportunities.”