Artificial Intelligence Makes Healthcare Finance More Human

Summer 2019

Artificial Intelligence Makes Healthcare Finance More Human

Jane Kaye, President of Healthcare Finance Advisors

by Jane C. Kaye, MBA

We’re seeing it everywhere. It’s Siri, it’s Alexa, it’s Google. It can suggest email responses, predict your Netflix preferences, understand your online shopping behavior. It’s the promise of a future where the cars drive themselves and the robots do the thinking. It’s all Artificial Intelligence. And it’s less dystopian than it sounds.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is broadly defined as the development of computer systems able to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence. Applied to business, AI allows organizations to automate repetitive processes through learning -- and it’s changing the type of work employees expect and the pace in which it gets done.

The healthcare industry is no exception. But while the clinical side is seeing a boom in flashy AI technology, from surgical robots to automated diagnosing, the backend financial operations have been slower to adopt.

So what would an AI-optimized healthcare financial system look like? When we think about how it affects the rest of our lives -- saving time and increasing efficiency -- we can begin to understand how it applies to healthcare business operations. By simplifying and streamlining repetitive tasks, AI technologies have the potential to make our work in healthcare finance more human, creating space for critical thinking, opening up new career pathways, allowing employees control of the process, and potentially even contributing to lower healthcare costs.

Applying AI to Healthcare Finance

Most of the immediate and relevant applications of AI in healthcare finance center on streamlining data gathering through robotic process automation (RPA), which uses software robots to automate business processes. These “bots” are configurable software that perform tasks of which an employee can assign and control, interacting with multiple programs as a human employee would. Within healthcare finance, these bots typically apply to repetitive tasks like pulling billing data from disparate sources into one place, or performing time- and labor-intensive monthly account reconciliations.

Brian Huggins, Corporate Controller at Partners Health-

Jane C. Kaye

Care, has been working to implement these sorts of efficiencies across his organization’s accounting operations. A system incorporating Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Spaulding Rehabilitation Network, McLean Hospital and many other healthcare entities across the Boston area and beyond, Partners continues to merge and expand, increasingly demanding an efficient financial operation for strategic growth.

“At Partners, the foundation for any of our automation starts with process improvement,” Brian says. And from Brian’s experience, one of the biggest areas benefiting from process improvement is the account reconciliation part of the monthly financial statement close. In the traditional closing process, accountants focus on reconciling transactions -- a repetitive task with little added value. RPA tools enable employees to write a command that quickly reconciles transactions and highlights errors or mismatches, thereby freeing time to thoughtful analysis focused on understanding, correcting and preventing these mismatches.

In this way, the RPA system allows people within the finance function to take on a whole new capacity, increasing analytical thinking while also increasing the accuracy of the information analyzed.

“No matter how proficient machines become in automating transactional accounting tasks, they can’t analyze the data,” echoes Vin Messina, Strategic Account Manager at BlackLine, a software company supplying cloud-based financial automation solutions. “You need people to do that.”

Vin has worked across many different industries making the transition to AI-enabled period-end financial close, and has noticed that healthcare financial operations are slower to adapt. Yet with the mergers and growth we’re seeing across the hospital industry -- and as Brian is experiencing firsthand at Partners -- streamlining financial processes and creating efficiencies in the workforce are more important now than ever.

“The benefits go beyond process optimization, improved accuracy and increased efficiency,” Vin says. “Automation software enables the deployment of finance personnel to take on more involvement in higher value-add activities – and become

strategic advisors to the business.” As healthcare finance operations catch up with automation technology, Vin and Brian are both seeing how it can allow for more strategic hiring to accompany expansion, thereby contributing to a reduction in healthcare administrative costs going forward.

Keeping Pace with the Next Generation of Workers

In New Jersey, John Doll, Chief Financial Officer of RWJBarnabas Health, is piloting similar strategies. John sees AI entering healthcare finance at the perfect time -- in conjunction with a new generation of employees with different skills, education and career expectations.

“A challenge we have is disconnected systems requiring repetitive work,” John says. “And at the same time, we’re seeing a new generation of workers looking for a different type of job.”

Technologically minded, today’s millennial workers are seeking a higher level of employment: one that enables them to think critically, understand the big picture and make informed decisions. Ideally the entrylevel, disconnected and repetitive work John identified can be automated through process automation, giving the employee a higherlevel duty to oversee and manage it. Under John’s leadership, RWJBarnabas Health’s finance team is exploring process automation for people-intensive, repetitive tasks, such as insurance follow-up or cash posting.

Encouraging employees to do more highlevel thinking, data analysis and reporting can also help increase satisfaction and retention and catalyze career growth, John comments. As this elevated level of critical thinking brings even more humanity into the process, employees are empowered with the time and mental capacity to bring their full brain to the job.

While John notes that process automation elevates the type of work humans are responsible for on a big-picture level, Brian also observes that it opens up new and different career paths for healthcare finance employees interested in RPA’s more technical applications. RPA technology implementation and maintenance brings a demand for employees with specific organizational knowledge and technical brains, especially when it comes to building effective bots to do the job. Brian has

been identifying individuals who know the organization, team and processes to build bots to operate within these systems.

A People-Centric Implementation Approach

“The best finance leaders are going to use AI as an opportunity to up-skill their team by eliminating repetitive tasks that are currently being executed within the finance function and focus on more value-add tasks that will be more analytical in nature and provide more insight to the business,” says Michael

George, Audit Partner at PwC. While the global consulting firm may be developing advanced ways to apply AI in serving clients, the healthcare finance industry can look to its example, especially when it comes to empowering employees with the right opportunities to develop their digital acumen, which will be leveraged in running the business in the future.

As part of an organization-wide digital transformation strategy across 55,000 employees in the U.S., PwC identified over 2,000 employees called "digital accelerators" to train on several forms of automation including AI technologies and tools, fulltime, for two years, and then deployed them as experts to train their colleagues within the different lines of service. The firm also empowered its employees to identify mundane, repetitive processes in their everyday workload and automate them. This sort of employee-driven and -led development and implementation again reminds us that automation including AI exists to help employees think bigger, better and more strategically.

Brian’s own AI implementation experience at Partners Health took a similar approach. Though he led Partners through an RPA system transformation, Brian ultimately entrusted his team -- those closest to the everyday work and technology -- with the decision of which software system to implement. He then identified a handful of managers to run the actual software rollout, as they understood the systems the best. Involving people in this sort of change helped mitigate any perceived threats while empowering employees to elevate their own abilities.

What About ROI?

As a costly investment for a healthcare organization, AI automation technology brings with it pressure to demonstrate an immediate ROI. But it’s an iterative process, creating a variety of organizational impacts that aren’t immediately quantifiable. As John, Brian and Michael have observed, the technology can elevate the employee experience and open up new career opportunities, while creating efficiencies that allow healthcare systems to scale up strategically. AI in healthcare finance can save time, reduce errors and increase capacity, and, through all this, has the potential to lower the administrative cost of providing healthcare.

“You think about everything on the clinical side, where they’re using AI to make better, more informed decisions on healthcare. I have to imagine that if we can make better, more informed financial decisions, we’d ultimately come to a lower cost,” Brian observed. “What I do know now though is that we’re more efficient.”

Regardless of a quantifiable ROI at this time, we’re seeing what Brian refers to as “soft dollar savings” -- more efficient financial operations and more productive employees. While cost savings may be ahead, the benefits to the financial workforce are immediate -- cultivating a more human way of functioning after all.

About the Author Jane Kaye is the founder and President of HealthCare Finance Advisor. Jane also teaches healthcare finance at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Jane can be reached at jane@hcfadvisors.com.