Humana Hires Digital Coworker to Embed Their Documentation Automation, Saving 684,000 Hours and Millions in Administrative Costs

Organization profile

Headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, Humana is a leader in the healthcare industry, offering insurance products and services. Constantly striving to connect their patients to the human part of healthcare, they seek ways to provide better, personalized care. They improve routine healthcare practices and use embedded process improvements to drive their mission.

THE CHALLENGE

Incessantly striving to bridge patients with the human side of their industry, Humana was startled to see that their clinicians focused most of their time on redundant, “non-human” parts of their job. Employees spent roughly 80% of their time documenting their interactions, creating care plans, and medical charting, rather than interacting with their patients.

Looking at the landscape of their company, Humana discovered the same was true across the board in nearly all departments and sought ways to take these tasks off the plate of their employees, focusing on reducing regulatory risk, reducing repetition, and eliminating redundancies.

684k

Hours in documentation processing per year

80%

Of all document processing automated company-wide

Hours of document processing saved per day for clinicians

ROI for every dollar spent

When they invented ATMs,the tellers thought, 'this is going to replace my job.' In reality, it transformed their job.”

--Joe Bechtel, Leader of Intelligent Automation, Humana quote

THE SOLUTION

Eager to enhance the personalized care of their customers, they focused on automating clinicians’ tasks, looking for ways to allow them to spend more time with their patients instead of document processing, while also reducing risk. Humana partnered with Automation Anywhere to achieve those goals. Leveraging their intelligent process automation (IPA), Humana embedded their RPA connections within their clinicians’ daily workflow, employing 100+ bots, while trying to transition as seamlessly as possible. With an eye on scaling to the rest of the company, they started their automation journey, targeting document processing, clinician auditing, and overall redundancies.

Processes Automated

Documentation Processing

Clinical Auditing (Checks, Risk Reduction, etc.)

Medical Chart Reviews

THE WHOLE STORY

To decrease its redundant tasks, improve the customer experience, and improve their employees’ experience, Humana collaborated with Automation Anywhere to embed document processing automation and audit automation into the clinicians’ workday. Looking first at transforming the clinician’s role, they formed committee sessions, dubbing these sessions the “Art of the Possible.” These sessions were comprised of practicing clinicians and tasked participants with clearly defining their roles and pinpointing how to build automation into their roles. Within a short time, they removed most of their document processing, remodeling their jobs to one more aligned with their mission.

With the success of the clinicians, the company set out to expand its automation success to other departments. They built a cross-functional community of stakeholders with domain-specific expertise and assigned them the task of identifying and implementing improvements.

Humana understood how important broad employee buy-in would be to the implementation and success of its embedded automation systems. Most employees were afraid of automation and didn’t feel they had time to adjust to it. With the help of clever internal marketing, Humana introduced “Allie,” a digital employee “hired” to take on the redundant, boring tasks off their plate. Soon, employee perception began to change, with employees referring to Allie as a coworker or a friend. This mindset further generated grassroots innovation ideas. Humana quickly scaled to 100+ bots, automating 3,000 processes, including most of the document processing, saving millions in administrative costs, reducing human errors, reducing risk, and drastically improving employee morale.

THE FUTURE

Keeping healthcare “human” continues to be the driving force with Humana. Using automation as their primary tool for this, they expanded their center of excellence from 4 to 46 people. This has laid a foundation to drive citizen development initiatives. In the past year alone, there were an additional 179 citizen developers trained on Automation 360™ across 15 business units. The company seeks to establish a community of practice that focuses on transforming Humana into a technology and industry leader.

I learned employees worked with the patients about six hours a day and then spent the rest documenting.”

-Joe Bechtel,Leader of Intelligent Automation, Humana quote

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