Electronic health records (EHR) and electronic medical records (EMR) improve the quality of care by making it easier for medical practitioners to access and share patient data. And that's why today, EHR/EMR adoption rates are higher than ever at around 89%. However, despite the many benefits EHR systems offer, there's still room for improvement. 

Many healthcare organizations deployed EHR software years ago and have found the systems rather clunky and inflexible in fast-paced modern healthcare environments. And one of the most pressing issues with EHR systems is data errors. An eye-watering 86% of mistakes in the healthcare sector are administrative. Sometimes the wrong information is entered, and other times the correct information is entered in the wrong place. In addition, EHR error flags are often ignored due to alert fatigue. 

Reduce Administrative Medical Errors with RPA

Robotic process automation (RPA) can dramatically reduce administrative medical errors in numerous ways. 

Automated Data Entry

Smart bots can handle many aspects of data entry. For example, automation robots can send information from monitoring equipment to a patient's chart, eliminating the risk of errors when logging data like temperature, blood pressure, and weight. 

Critically, RPA bots also read and enter data for you. For example, optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology can read and extract text from images and various other documents before populating data fields. Doing this can eliminate costly human errors and free up workers' time for more pressing tasks. 

Data Syncing 

Healthcare organizations often use multiple systems to manage EHRs effectively. However, this is one of the areas where the most administrative errors occur. Busy and stressed workers may make typos and miscalculations or forget to complete a task because they've been interrupted by a more urgent one. Luckily, RPA can help here. Automation bots can push information to or pull information from various systems, ensuring all data is consistent and up to date. 

Data Validation

RPA tools can cross-check data across systems and send alerts to the appropriate team if any inconsistencies arise. This allows healthcare admin teams to take a proactive approach to data accuracy, ensuring problems are fixed before they can impact patient outcomes. 

Order Sets

Order sets are decision support tools that help physicians prescribe appropriate treatments using a pre-defined set of standard orderables. Order sets reduce two types of medical errors: rules-based and knowledge-based. 

They reduce rules-based errors by offering a checklist for ordering. This ensures physicians don't forget to order a necessary item in the case of more complex treatments. 

Similarly, order sets reduce knowledge-based medical errors by embedding current medical best practices into the order set. Order sets include recommended dosages and treatment plans based on evidence-based research. This ensures physicians don't accidentally miscalculate dosage. 

RPA is often the foundational technology of order sets, offering a way to reduce medical errors and develop a safer healthcare environment. 

Want to learn more? Click here to read more about how RPA is reducing human error in healthcare.