Extending legacy healthcare software: RPA technology
Tags: productivity, security, computerscience, automation
Published: 2024-04-04 11:35:44

_This post is a quick overview of an Abto Software [blog article](https://www.abtosoftware.com/blog/extending-legacy-healthcare-software-rpa-technology)._

Legacy systems, installed on-premises, are fundamental, mission-critical programs no longer receiving support. Still performing core functions, such programs don’t provide modern features and remain at their initial state, typically provoking serious problems.

In the last decade, modern-day technology has empowered business leaders across industries to transform their operations and adopt innovative solutions, and the healthcare industry is not an exception.

Previously dominated by traditional manual processes – data entry and retrieval, document management – healthcare technology has evolved and presented EHR/EMR systems, remote monitoring, cloud-based storage. This revolution has revolutionized administrative processes, everyday interaction between professionals, patient outcomes, and even business performance.

In this brief overview, we’ll shed some light on how healthcare decision-makers can harness greater efficiency by approaching RPA integration.

## Keeping legacy healthcare systems: cybersecurity insights

With legacy healthcare systems, the problem is that these programs don’t receive regular updates and patches. This causes security vulnerabilities, interoperability issues, limited flexibility and scalability, as well as other significant shortcomings.

As to the HIMSS cybersecurity survey:

- Trimming 73% healthcare organizations have reported still using legacy software
- Perceptible 34% of interviewed healthcare companies have reported that their legacy applications trigger challenges associated with security vulnerabilities 

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/uian7bmlz355ppkeprfk.jpg)

## Maintaining legacy healthcare systems: key challenges

### Security vulnerabilities

Outdated systems are lacking security updates and patches, which makes them vulnerable to cyberthreats. These comprise data breaches, data theft and loss, credential leakage, insider threats, phishing, ransomware, and more.

### Interoperability issues

Outdated systems typically utilize older protocols, which entangle information sharing between applications. This deteriorates everyday communication and collaboration and provokes data inaccuracies, fragmented care, and many other issues.

### Manual processes

Legacy systems are typically associated with manual processes, which cause complex and inefficient workflows. This way, healthcare organizations are facing data discrepancy, misallocated resources, degraded productivity, and mediocre patient outcomes.

### Regulatory compliance

Legacy systems might struggle to meet industry-specific requirements, including HIPAA, GDPR, HL7, and others. In consequence, healthcare companies might suffer operational disruption, reputational and financial damage, and even legal penalties.

## RPA integration: modernization without operational disruption

Replacing older legacy software might first seem reasonable, but there are bottlenecks worth considering – data migration, user acceptance, change management, user adoption and training are just the beginning. Commonly, older legacy systems are maintained for their fundamental functionality, mostly mission-critical.

The capabilities (and sometimes, the limitations) of obsolete legacy software are dictating everyday operations. Making changes to such legacy systems might necessitate an overhaul of processes.

So how can strategic-thinking healthcare providers deal with existing constraints without compromising operational efficiency?

In situations where migration isn’t feasible, robotic process automation (RPA) may improve business efficiency. More attainable in terms of time and cost, robotic process automation adoption can enhance many aspects, including daily administration burden, security, interoperability, and more.

## RPA application in the healthcare industry

### Administrative processes

- Appointment scheduling – appointment scheduling, personal reminders, and rescheduling
- Patient registration – data entry, including extracting relevant information from forms
- Billing and claims processing – claim generation, coding validation, claim submission, and payment
- Insurance and eligibility verification – the verification of patient insurance coverage and eligibility

### Clinical operations

- Medical coding – medical coding, including extracting procedure details and other relevant information 
- Order entry – order entry, including processing physician requests for diagnostics and treatment
- Patient monitoring – appointment attendance, symptom reporting, medication adherence, and more
- Health monitoring and reporting – the collection and interpretation of essential health indicators, including temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen saturation, and more

### Human resources

- Employee on- and offboarding – leverage automated employee on- and offboarding by generating associated paperwork, managing records, provisioning access, and conducting exit interviews
- Performance evaluation – performance details, scheduling meetings, and even performance reports

### Help desk

- Incident management – the creation and routing of tickets for employee-reported software issues
- Password and account management – password reset, account provisioning, and more by validating employee identities, updating credentials, and granting access permissions
- Software installation and checks – the deployment of updates, software installations, and patches 
- Performance monitoring and reporting – the collection and analysis of critical performance metrics

## The reasons for automating help desk ticket creation

You might ask yourself, why should you implement RPA for legacy systems to automate the processes associated with incident management, password and account management, and other help desk related tasks? 

Let’s talk about automated help desk ticket creation:

### Patient-first care

Healthcare professionals always prioritize patient care, clinical assessment, treatment planning and execution. They don’t have time to populate support tickets, in particular in situations where personal patient interaction is way more important.

### Used workflows

Healthcare personnel will delay the process of reporting technical issues if it is possible to work around them. They tend to perceive the process of reporting software- and network-related problems as disruptive to their everyday workflows. 

### Communication and collaboration preferences

Your employees might prefer those channels they’re already familiar with – phone calls, messages, emails. Common practice, they perceive these channels more convenient and responsive if compared to utilizing support ticket management systems.

### Technical expertise

Healthcare professionals usually possess limited knowledge and experience with issue management systems. This means, they might feel unsure and overwhelmed with navigating unfamiliar interfaces.

## The benefits of automating support tickets 

Abto Software’s support ticket automation technology:

- Recognizes emerged software errors
- Captures information being required to report these errors 
- Logins user to the service desk management system 
- And instantly populates reports including descriptions, searching logs, and screenshots

With this support ticket automation solution:

- Your enable your workers to create and submit support tickets without hassle
- And ensure software issues are resolved right away, increasing data accuracy, decreasing waste time, and boosting business productivity

## How we can help

Abto Software delivers scalable robotic process automation products to forward-looking healthcare leaders. Our engineers help transform manual operations into easy-to-monitor, automated processes by handling everything from thorough discovery to support.

Harness measurable business outcomes right away by automating inefficient routines.

Our expertise within tailored-to-business IT services:

- .NET development
- ASP.NET development
- Web application development
- Mobile app development
- Cloud services
- Full-cycle custom software development

Our projects within the healthcare industry:

- Camera-based human pose detection for remote physical rehabilitation
- Personal medical device integration for mobile telemedicine application
- RPA platform legacy modernization
- Child abuse tracking, investigation & reporting healthcare platform