AI/ML boosts revenue cycle staffing efficiency, says Firstsource exec
KENTUCKY, UNITED STATES — Amid staffing challenges in healthcare revenue cycle management (RCM), artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies are emerging as powerful tools to boost healthcare staffing initiatives.
In an interview with Healthcare IT News, Firstsource senior vice president and revenue cycle practice leader Noel Felipe broke down how AI and ML systems help healthcare organizations in their recruitment operations and other operations.
“At the lowest level of intelligence, robotic process automation software bots can automate tasks like eligibility verification,” he started.
“Moving up in sophistication, machine learning algorithms can find the patterns in denied claims and help identify root causes. Further along still, generative AI can summarize physician notes and recommend correct medical codes.”
Additionally, AI can also help nurses and physicians with patient financial counseling tasks by being copilots, enabling RCM professionals to focus on the most critical work.
AI and ML can also provide valuable insights and analytics that can help healthcare systems spot areas for improvement and make more informed decisions about resource allocation and process optimization.
For organizations planning to integrate AI and ML into their systems, Felipe advised them to start small and make sure that their tasks really require AI.
“Understand the complexity of the decisions involved in a process,” he noted.
“Software bots can follow simple, set rules for making if/then decisions. AI and ML can make more sophisticated decisions based on data models that contain more variables but have discernible patterns. The simpler the decision, the quicker the technology implementation.”
Firstsource ranked #35 in the 2024 OA500, an objective index of the world’s top 500 outsourcing companies.
