Alpha Health, the first Unified Automation™ company for revenue cycle management in healthcare, released results of a national survey designed to assess adoption of automation in revenue cycle operations at health systems and hospitals across the U.S. According to the survey, 58.8 percent of health systems and hospital financial leaders mistakenly consider robotic process automation (RPA) to be a form of artificial intelligence (AI).

The survey was commissioned by Alpha Health and conducted through the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s (HFMA) Pulse Survey program. The survey was fielded between May 19, 2020 and June 22, 2020 among 587 chief financial officers and revenue cycle leaders at health systems across the United States. The survey has a confidence level of 95 percent with a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percent.

Aggressive marketing language can often drive a lack of clarity around technical concepts. Somewhat surprising, is that confusion between RPA and AI is high even among organizations that have automation in place and have likely gone through the diligence and/or request for proposal (RFP) process to select their automation solution. More than 50 percent of CFOs and revenue cycle leaders in organizations that are actively using automation say they consider RPA to be a form of artificial intelligence.

“RPA based bots can be good tools for automating simple, discrete, and static tasks,” said Varun Ganapathi, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Alpha Health. “AI and machine learning based technologies are capable of automating much more complex tasks that require some degree of judgment or subject matter expertise. Additionally, AI and machine learning based solutions can have the ability to navigate changes or new variables without the need to reprogram or recode a bot every time something changes.” Read On: