Attended robotic process automation of prescriptions’ digitization

Abstract Document digitization has important industrial applications and automation of this process can unlock significant business value, especially when documents are in the form of image files that are not directly machine readable. A medical prescription contains information about a patient's health status and is an important tool for prevention of drug abuse and patient safety. In our organization, in the interests of patient safety and to minimize dispensation errors, the customer is required to upload a picture of the prescription with her order if it contains any prescription drug. Once this prescription is digitized, the system decides the eligibility for dispensation of the ordered medicines based on the information extracted from the prescription. Since we process thousands of medicine orders everyday for which a large number of man-hours are required for processing the uploaded prescriptions, a key opportunity was identified in this process to make it more efficient and faster. In this paper, we describe how artificial intelligence and ingenious solutions have enabled us to automate different elements of the screening process and present metrics for evaluating the performance of the automated process. Our paper demonstrates that attended robotic process automation reduces the human effort to verify a prescription and facilitates a superior employee experience. We also underpin the importance of prescription data to the healthcare community at large and advocate that such automations further the cause of healthcare research.