Establishing a Center of Excellence for sustainable intelligent automation

Summary

A large healthcare system in Indiana sought to enhance patient experience, outcomes, and employee satisfaction through digital transformation. To achieve these goals, they partnered with Marlabs to implement AI/ML and IA solutions. By establishing Centers of Excellence (CoEs), the healthcare system aimed to optimize processes, improve patient experience, and drive top-line growth.

Challenge

The healthcare system faced challenges in achieving desired patient experience, outcomes, and employee satisfaction. Disparate systems, manual processes, and a need for process improvement hindered their ability to deliver optimal care. To address these issues, they needed to establish CoEs capable of implementing AI/ML and IA solutions.

Solution

Marlabs played a pivotal role in helping the healthcare system establish an IA CoE and identify automation opportunities across various departments. The CoE focused on high-cost processes and developed automation solutions to streamline tasks such as:

• Referral Intake: Automating the process from initial referral to acceptance, assignment, and nurse scheduling. This reduced decision time and improved administrative efficiency.
• Vendor Contract Updates: Creating an automation solution to update and search vendor contracts, supporting downstream operations. The solution was later adapted for pharmacy agreements.
• New Hire Certification Verification: Automating the follow-up process to verify nursing new hires' certification status through state licensing web portals. The design allowed for scalability to other certifications and roles.

To support the CoE's success, Marlabs provided several key services:

• Resource Development: Assisting the healthcare system in building internal IA resources and hiring external talent.
• Governance Implementation: Designing and implementing governance frameworks to establish a foundation for operationalizing and scaling enterprise automation.
• Solution Development: Collaborating with the healthcare system's IT organization and business groups to identify and build automation solutions tailored to their specific needs.
• Knowledge Transfer: Sharing expertise and best practices in intelligent automation (IA) to enable the healthcare system to sustain and grow their capabilities.

By providing these services, Marlabs helped the healthcare system establish a robust IA CoE that could effectively identify, develop, and implement automation solutions across the organization.

Results

The implementation of an IA CoE enabled the healthcare system to achieve significant benefits, including:

• Labor Cost Savings: Manual effort reduction of nearly 70% in home healthcare administration.
• Compliance Assurance: Increased confidence in passing audits and controlling risk through automated testing.
• Reduced Liability Risk: Automated validation of regulated policies and ethical standards.
• Reduced Case Processing Time: Nearly 85% reduction in referral processing time for home healthcare.
• Process Oversight: Tracking and support of digital workforce through a digital process dashboard.
• Capability Integration: Seamless integration of AI/ML, IDP, OCR, and NLP solutions.
• Increased Job Satisfaction: Shift towards more value-add and rewarding work for employees.