Posted on behalf of Marianne Soucy, Director of Client Solutions

It’s ok, I’ll just do it myself……

I’m not sure how many times a day I hear myself saying those words, but it’s a lot.

Delegation has never been my strong suit. As I have moved ahead in my career, though, it’s become a necessary evil to learn what tasks NEED to be done with a certain level of knowledge and insight, and admit which can be delegated.

It’s tempting to think “well but I have to be the one to do THAT” but honestly, do you really? If so, why, and how can you fix that? It’s a bad process if it cannot be succinctly explained and handed off, and being buried under administrative tasks is not good for anyone’s career, leaving less time to do the more valuable work on your plate.

Why is it so hard to let go of “what we always do”? Even when we don’t actually enjoy doing it?

At a certain salary level, hours of busywork cost a company WAY more than the tasks are actually worth. A former boss once pointed out to me what a certain task that I balked at abandoning was costing the company on a yearly basis. The number was sobering.When she put it that way, I was pretty floored that I didn’t realize the hidden costs sooner.  I would think twice about buying supplies at that cost, but I thought nothing of the dollar value the time in my workday the task was actually costing the company. And that’s when I figured out how to automate it…

Having access to a RPA solution (aka Scripting) puts me in a unique position to look at things that one can easily (and not so easily) automate and estimate the ROI of doing so. Some things need a human touch. But a surprising number of things actually don’t.

What is the hourly pay rate of employees in your organization that do data entry or routine tasks on a regular basis? What would be the tipping point at which it makes sense to automate those ongoing tasks?

These are questions that as the year closes and a lot of routine year end tasks crop up, it might make good financial sense to ask.

  • Do you have highly specialized IT staff spending time creating users in Active Directory and other systems? What about de-credentialing them when they leave?
  • Do you have staff creating, admitting, and discharging test patients for EVERY software upgrade, sometimes in multiple systems? Ordering and resulting test labs and testing other systems?
    • How many more tests could you run to test an upgrade if you could automate this?
  • Who in your organization cleans up expired orders, appointments, and other entries from your HCIS?
  • How do you process things like writing off bad debts? Closing old GL codes and creating new ones?
  • How do you handle processing batch payroll changes, withholding changes, insurance open enrollment?
  • How do you process bulk changes like room charge rates?
  • Do you run standard reports daily, weekly, hourly, monthly? Does a staff member manually trigger those reports?
  • Finally, what other work could your employees (or you) be doing with the time spent doing any of the above

If you think automation could help your organization, please let us help you look at your processes objectively. Your bottom line will thank you for it.