Process improvements for the real world

When it comes to business processes, most companies are still consulting flow charts from five years ago. They burn millions of dollars and precious employee time without doing real process mining and without a real sense for what’s happening behind the scenes. 

In a booming economy, such inefficiency might have been permissible. But the world has changed. Now companies and organizations can’t afford to carry extra weight — or work from outdated process maps. No one wants to find themselves in the middle of a crisis. But when they do, it can be a good time to step back and assess basic business operations. For enterprises, a more efficient core can mean they’re better equipped to survive a massive economic shift. For hospitals, stepped-up efficiency means nothing short of saving more lives. 

More efficiency—and fairness—in insurance

Think of the standard operating procedure for most insurance claims, which agents can likely repeat in their sleep: 

assess damage →  calculate loss → note loss on policy →  approve or deny claim

Insurers have been evaluating claims with such steps, plus a handful of worn-out risk formulas, for decades. 

But imagine an insurer could map this process using years of its own past data. Which claims are most susceptible to fraud? Which demographic groups are more likely to be approved for certain claims? Transparency into every aspect of claims management could not only help identify steps that are time-consuming or error-prone, but also those that are potentially discriminatory. 

Helping healthcare workers make on-the-spot decisions

Now picture a nurse in a bustling clinic. She’s juggling forms, answering calls, and taking someone’s temperature, all while trying to assess a new patient. The patient: an overweight 45-year-old male with high stress and a checkered medical history. Should she administer a diabetes test? 

The factors that influence the decision are many. Beyond her training and best instincts, what if she had a ready answer from a system informed by real-time information? An AI model might pull in a number of factors, like anonymized patient health data, which would save the busy nurse time. It could also reduce errors, making sure tests were doled out only to those patients who need them. 

A new world of transparency 

Process mining in companies goes something like this: data analysts (or outside consultants) gather up log files from corporate information systems and use that gathered data for analysis. This can tell a company how the steps in its main processes are carried out, and how those steps relate.

But process mining has also historically been limited to visualizing processes from single data sources. Or, just getting to the analysis stage can require long, expensive data prep. And analysts are often stumped when they find that work travels around the company in a circuitous path generating data from a multitude of sources in a pile that’s large, hard to parse, and never clean.

Process mining + actionable AI 

That’s why we’re excited to announce Insights. The gist is that you can now take process maps and turn them into an actionable AI — essentially letting you collect the wisdom of your company experts into one powerful AI model. 

Out in the real world, Insights can solve all sorts of problems: Our busy nurse could not only draw on anonymized patient data for diagnostic testing, but also on any broader national trends that might influence health. She could add all of these in as factors in her model — the more data, the better.  

While Insights is only available to customers for now, please feel free to sign up for a demo. 

Automation Hero is committed to making this technology accessible in the fight against Covid-19 and is offering its platform free of charge to the healthcare community. For more information, click here.