5 Ways RPA Can Advance the Pharmaceutical Industry

The pharmaceutical industry is a crucial sector that supplies society's drugs and medicines. Especially during COVID-19, pharmaceutical institutions need to devote time to researching and creating effective medicine to improve public health. However, while pharmaceutical institutions should be spending the majority of their effort discovering new drugs, they are often bogged down by repetitive, administrative tasks that are monotonous, inefficient, and error-prone. Lots of time, effort, and money are put into these high frequency, low-value administrative tasks, which slows down essential drug development.

By adopting advanced technology, pharmaceutical firms can free up human labor and focus on pharmaceuticals rather than administration. RPA (robotic process automation), software that can emulate human operations on a PC under predefined rules, is popular in assisting workers in many departments and industries. Capable of working 24/7 all year round and unaffected by external factors like stress or fatigue, RPA bots work with much higher accuracy, efficiency, and speed compared to their human counterparts. Here at Laiye, we offer Laiye UiBot, an RPA product that can help pharmaceutical institutions complete repetitive, manual tasks. In this article, we explore 5 scenarios were Laiye UiBot can help.

Scenario 1: Drug supplier management

Some large healthcare organizations need to manage many drug suppliers. The supplier's reputation and quality will directly affect the entire healthcare organization. To evaluate suppliers, employees must:

1, Review supplier information from the ERP(enterprise resource planning) system

2, Search supplier information to determine whether the supplier has any negative information

3, Collect information such as supplier delivery time and after-sales service of drugs

4, Perform data analysis on the collected supplier information and rate each supplier regularly

5, Generate a report and send it to the administrator

Human judgment is error-prone, meaning that drug suppliers could be misevaluated. If this happens, the healthcare organization may suffer from unnecessary claims made for inferior medicines. Laiye UiBot can standardize and enhance this process by automatically using search engine tools to scan a supplier's information comprehensively and at regular time intervals. It can then rate each supplier and send a report to an employee for review. This simplifies the process while also standardizing evaluation, making sure only the best suppliers are filtered in.

Scenario 2: Medical bill management

Daily medical bills involve data interaction between many systems, and staff members need to log in and manually record the data. They would follow this process:

1, Read the patient's information from the client system

2, Summarize the patient's expense information daily/weekly/monthly, including the patient's medical expenses, ward expenses, doctor expenses, etc.

3, Generate expense reports from the data and store them in a designated location/system

Manually calculating and collecting patient expenses is a tedious task, not to mention an inefficient and accurate one as well. Mistakes made here could lead to customer dissatisfaction and disputes, which may also lead to a loss of revenue. Instead, Laiye UiBot ensures nearly 100% accuracy. It is capable of handling data from formats such as Excel, PDF, and Word, making it extremely flexible. It can also make sure no items are overlooked or double-counted.

Scenario 3: Contract management

Proper contract management is very important for medical and healthcare institutions' after-sales service because many problems with drugs are caused by suppliers making claims. To review contracts, employees have to:

1, Extract contract information from CRM (customer relationship management)

2, Classify and manage contract information, including regular contracts, special contracts, etc.

3, Enter the contract information into the designated system, and establish an index catalog to help users quickly find the contract in future inquiries

Though the process seems simple, healthcare institutions faced with a mountain of contracts are very inefficient and inaccurate. Human labor alone is insufficient for this tedious task. Laiye Uibot can effortlessly manage contracts. Regardless of the contract's file type, Laiye UiBot can automatically extract information from PDFs, JPEGs, and other formats, and convert it into text using its own OCR (Optical Character Recognition). It can then fill in the appropriate information fields in the system automatically, making organizing contracts quick and easy.

Scenario 4. Medical staff management

Some medical staff must take a leave of absence. Although this work leave can be registered in the institution's internal ERP system, it cannot be updated in real-time. The manual process is the following:

1, Read all personnel information from the human resource system and classify them according to the type of work they do

2, Extract the out-of-office information in the ERP, and compare the information with the human resources information to confirm the absentee

3, Send the report to the administrator

It is important to make sure that the organization knows who is currently away and who has returned. Manually checking is a waste of time and effort, and it can also result in mistakes. With Laiye UiBot, robots can send real-time updates to an administrator to closely monitor those with absence. It can also expedite data extraction and comparison.

Scenario 5: Claims management

Claims processing in the healthcare industry is a typical yet time-consuming task. The entire process involves many processes and requires the collection of large amounts of data from different sources. Done manually, a staff member would need to:

1, Extract user claims from the system

2, Collect data from all parties and analyze to confirm whether the request meets the claims' standards

3, Compensate accordingly if the standards are met

4, Notify and report the entire claims process to the appropriate staff after the claim is processed successfully

Done manually, claims processing is inefficient and often inaccurate due to human error, especially due to the frequency of this repetitive task. Inaccuracies can create problems down the road as errors will need to be rectified. Laiye UiBot can help automate this process efficiently and accurately. It can collect data and compare the requests against the standards, and if a request does not comply, it can forward the claim to an employee for manual review. If it does comply, Laiye UiBot can automatically complete compensation and generate a report, which saves time, effort, and money.

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These five cases are only a few out of the endless possibilities RPA brings to the pharmaceutical industry. In just one or two hours with help from our professional team, you can start building your Laiye UiBot robots and explore their full potential.

About Laiye

Laiye, founded in 2015 by Ivy League Ph.D. graduates, is committed to being a leading Smart Robot platform with global influence in the era of human-robot collaboration. Our portfolio of high-quality, secure products and services covers RPA Solution, including Laiye UiBot (an RPA product), Laiye Wulai (an enterprise chatbot platform), and Xiaolai (a companion robot). Join us on LinkedIn, follow us on Facebook, or visit laiye.com/en.