A Healthy Dose of Automation : Omega Healthcare Enhances Business Operations

Omega Healthcare Management Services Private Limited specializes in medical billing, coding, accounts receivable management, and other healthcare-related services. The company started its operations in 2003 with a vision to be a global leader and provider of healthcare business and knowledge process outsourcing services.

Today, it is well-known in the industry for its strong domain knowledge, platform development, and automation skills. This combination gives them a unique edge over their competitors.

Omega Healthcare has been on a digital transformation journey for the last few years. It has also been at the forefront of robotic process automation (RPA) to accelerate business value. The company started by developing and creating an in-house automation tool to optimize the internal systems.

“While our automation tool was competent enough, it wasn’t good enough to help us achieve the scale that we had in mind. In addition, as automation tools are code-intensive, we needed specific skilled resources which were hard to find,” says Vijayashree Natarajan, SVP - Head of Technology, Omega Healthcare Management Services.

Low code meets business scale

Rather than wade into the ocean of automation tools alone, Omega Healthcare decided to partner with UiPath to leverage the benefit of a low code automation platform.

Omega Healthcare chose UiPath as it helped them to create an entire roadmap for their automation vision and offered a suite of solutions that were in sync with their needs.

“We were impressed by the suite of products available in the UiPath Platform to support our automation strategy and meet future business needs,” adds Vijayashree Natarajan.

Another key reason for Omega Healthcare to partner with UiPath was to assist and/or free employees from low-value, repetitive tasks, redesign mission-critical business workflows, and achieve better efficiency.

Conquering accounts receivables with automation

The majority of Omega Healthcare’s work consists of back-office work from hospitals and other related services like third-party administrators to process insurance claims. These processes fall under three specific service lines viz. medical coding; account receivables (AR) and payment processing.  All these service lines have a standardized set of processes that needs to be carried out for all our customers.

Take the case of AR. Every business understands the importance of AR as it affects the cash flow of the provider. Improper management of AR can lead to unhealthy cash inflow.

“In a scenario where there are thousands of claims, and then trying to find out which one is to be concentrated more and which ones need less concentration is a very complex process. This kind of challenge led to decreased AR efficiency and revenue collection,” informs Vijayashree Natarajan.

“With our current automated platform, the bots check the claims every seven days. This has helped in reduced claim follow-up from 30 days to seven days, thereby improving our days' sales outstanding (DSO). In addition, the claim resolution time has decreased to 70% post automation and quicker actions on denials have resulted in reducing late payments and penalties,” says Raju Siva, VP-Technology & Head of Automation, Omega Healthcare Management Services.

The bots perform proactive eligibility and authorization verification processes resulting in clean claims. This has helped reduce our claim to cash cycle time by 25-30% for the end-users.

Most Omega Healthcare bots currently run near to 22 hours a day. “We have optimized our bots in a way that a single robot takes up multiple processes. We have ensured that most of our robots reach a 90% utilization rate when it reaches a stabilization phase,” shares Raju.

Future automation roadmap

Omega Healthcare already has a five-year roadmap for automation in place.

“We are projecting huge financial savings through automation. The next step for us would be to integrate multiple workflow platforms with automation tools, to align with our BOT plus PLATFORM strategy,” says Vijayashree Natarajan.

The company is looking at complete automation and moving from being a traditional revenue cycle management (RCM) service provider to a digital RCM Provider.

“Our automation capabilities will give us a competitive edge. The idea is to have more machine intelligence work alongside human intelligence and achieve collective intelligence in the digital RCM journey,” explains Vijayashree Natarajan.