A series of digital initiatives significantly improved productivity and reduced costs at United Methodist Communities of New Jersey, which has several continuing care retirement communities. That’s according to a case study by the LeadingAge Center for Aging Services Technologies.
The project’s goal was to centralize all of the organization’s data into a functional data warehouse. UMC came into the project with limited experience with robotic process automation and only a basic understanding of the organization’s critical business processes, according to the study. Many functions were still being performed manually and data was siloed.
The study showed that integrating robotic process automation translated to a 75% reduction in processing time and an estimated savings of more than $250,000 in recaptured labor productivity.
“Eliminating the need for employees to manually look up information also improves overall efficiency and processing time. Additionally, the low-code Microsoft PowerApps allows for easy customization and scalability and ensures we can adapt it to the changing needs of the organization,” CAST said.
One of the project’s biggest challenges was figuring out how to transfer more than 80,000 resident documents and attachments, including lab results, entrance agreements and power of attorney forms, without risking the integrity of resident data. UMC, along with the Robotic Process Automation Center of Excellence, created an RPA bot in 14 days to automate the process of categorizing and uploading documents to the new system.
“The deployment of the bot was a success, and within a week all the documents were transferred to the new system, saving a significant amount of time and Labor,” according to CAST. “The RPA bot was highly efficient and helped to maintain the integrity of resident data during the [electronic medical records] migration process.”
