In the past, reducing costs, increasing revenue, or improving customer service were manual and mundane facets that only cost more time and money to accomplish for health insurance companies. But that’s a thing of the past. And you can’t afford to wait any longer. Truth be told, the longer you wait, the worse things are going to get.
Organizations want to reduce costs. This stands out as a pain point for many healthcare insurance companies. To be able to make more out of a budget is the dream of many C-suite executives. Reduction of costs doesn’t simply come from reducing resources either. It is more complex than that.
To start, the reduction of cost will come from many different areas, including the reshuffling of staff. If you can automate something that previously took up to 50 people to manually do, then cost savings are immediate and obvious. The goal is to not scare people away with automation, as implementation will bring efficiency and open new opportunities for workforce development and career advancement for current employees. Properly implementing IA assists in reducing labor costs through such practices as automated telephone customer service.
Does Automation Displace a Workforce?
According to the McKinsey report, “Jobs lost, jobs gained: Workforce transitions in a time of automation,” over 14% of the global workforce is expected to change their occupational categories in the near future. At the same time, more than half of all “work tasks” will be capable of being carried out by machines by 2025, meaning over 75 million jobs will be displaced. Moreover, this means that there will be new opportunities for advanced positions within organizations. Displaced doesn’t mean deleted.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg, as Intelligent Automation will lead to digital transformation and open the door to create stackable technology that complements one another and enables the creation of new jobs for humans. It is rightsizing your organization through the reduction of cost (machine learning creates even more opportunities for cost reduction and increased efficiencies).
Specifically for healthcare insurance companies, the rising cost of healthcare continues to put pressure that can potentially run up administrative tasks and fees. The average annual cost of US healthcare insurance premiums for family coverage has increased by roughly more than 300% in the last 20 years. This puts a strain on both organizations and the customer. Something has to give and your offering needs to match the dynamic wants and demands of your customers.
Putting Solutions in Motion
Over the years, Productive Edge has been seen a number of cost saving challenges facing the healthcare insurance industry, including: reviewing and standardizing written drug and SIG codes on incoming prescriptions, creating cognitive algorithms for matching, and routing unmatched prescriptions to a manual queue. Meeting these challenges is a difficult task, but by implementing solutions for IA, Productive Edge has helped customers realize as much as $1.6 million in year 1 cost savings on a single process. On top of that, these solutions have lead one client to an automated volume of approximately 400,000 prescriptions per day, while ramping up to 1 million by end of year.
Ready to get started on the road to intelligent automation? Contact us to talk about how you can start applying IA to your organization.
