You have invested in the best possible CRM system to generate leads, follow up on them, eventually close the sale and help them move in. You have invested in a different top notch medication management system and that helps you pass meds on time and stay compliant. You also have yet another Assisted Living charting and Assisted Living risk management system that helps you document on the residents and manage your risk. And you may have even more systems for billing, maintenance, accounting etc, each of them serving a critical function to your organization.
The challenge you face daily is in keeping the data consistent across all your systems, and making sure they work together. Some of them may be capable of interfacing with others and that will help streamline your operations to some extent. But I have yet to see a single organization where all of them work in harmony.
So what can you do to solve this conundrum? You have a couple of ways to go.
One option is to switch everything to a fully integrated system. This ‘rip and replace’ strategy may work for you, but it may not be possible in certain circumstances. Perhaps the integrated system does not have the best CRM features, but your current one does. So you don’t want to risk your sales process. However, there is something to be said for everything working in concert at all times, so there are advantages.
The second option comes in when you are NOT able to replace every system, or need multiple systems in place for various business and operational reasons. This is where Robotic Process Automation, RPA, is a godsend.
So what is RPA?
RPA, or Robotic Process Automation, is the technology used to mimic human actions on computers to take care of repetitive tasks. So if your sales person is responsible to moving over the data from the CRM system to the clinical system when a resident moves in, you are counting on her to remember to do this, and manually enter all the data into the clinical system. RPA can be set to automatically copy the data from the CRM system and enter it into the Clinical system without any software integration from your vendor and without any human intervention. The same can be done to add a new resident to the billing system etc.
Sound like magic? Not really – it is just a automated software process that upon being triggered by an event (resident moving in) can visually read one software system, and acting as a software robot, can log into the other systems and enter the data.
It is truly a huge time saver and greatly reduces data entry errors and omissions. This also solves the issue of running incompatible software systems and helping you get them to work together and streamline operations.
If you would like to know more, please reach out to me so I can help you understand this better. I look forward to talking to you soon!
- Naveen Venkatachalam, posted 07/07/2020