As COVID-19 reaches every aspect of life, organizations and industries, such as healthcare, life sciences, and the public sector, are all finding new methods to defend against the spread of this virus and diminish the impact that could have long-term effects on the businesses and the global economy.
Be it anywhere, Automation provides a lot of tools and solutions to support the customers in navigating these unprecedented challenges.
But to understand the importance of RPA in tackling Covid-19, we need to understand what RPA exactly is-
What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
RPA is nothing but a form of business process automation that allows anyone to define a set of instructions and rules for a robot or ‘bot’ to perform. These bots can perform most of the human-computer interactions, execute a ton of error-free tasks, at high speed.
RPA automates almost all the everyday processes that once required a human action — often a very time-consuming fashion. That’s another way how RPA promises to boost efficiency for organizations across every industry.
Benefits of RPA
There are many immediate benefits from adopting RPA.
- Cost Savings: RPA delivers significant and immediate expenditure reduction. When the work is automated, not only will it complete faster, but it can also be performed round-the-clock and at a significantly lower rate.
- Simplicity and Flexibility: You don’t need to know any sort of coding or scriptwriting for automating the tasks through RPA. That just means that even the complex processes can be transferred from human to machine with little to no effort at all. The early adopters of workflow automation start reaping the benefits of RPA even before anybody noticing.
- Better Control: There is a sort of a trend in many companies to outsource the so-called busy work to external third parties. Which, of course, comes with some inherited risk. RPA can provide a better solution in-house, which means that the business maintains maximum possession, control, and visibility.
Applications of RPA During the Global Pandemic
1. Accelerated Patient Enroll for COVID Testing
In these horrifying times, where diagnostic labs, drive-through testing centers, and hospitals are testing thousands of people per day for COVID-19, there is an absolutely desperate need to speed up the process of looking up each patient in the site’s electronic medical records, then adding the patient to the system, sharing the information with the CDC, and reporting back to the patient. Bots have provenly saved 8–9 minutes per patient and avoided manual data entry errors.
2. Handled Unprecedented Product Demand
From grocery stores to essential service providers, and personal protective equipment manufacturers, there are huge segments of the economy that have experienced product demand as they have ever seen before. By the use of bots to process these orders, companies already coping with reduced workforces can now redeploy critical headcount toward fulfilling the high volume of orders filed.
Summing Up
The current emergency has clearly shown how a mass contagion can endanger every aspect of a traditional personal and professional lifestyle. In the likely future, organizations may continue using RPA and other intelligent automation solutions in their business processes, to simplify and make the business operations effective and productive.
