EPISODE OVERVIEW:
“Problems = opportunities”, reminds this week’s guest – Chris Gilmore, Applications Technology Leader at Aetna. His recent interview on the CX Network Podcast delves into automation solutions for organisations, robotics and the importance of partnerships between IT and business teams.
Working with Aetna Insurance, Chris’s role focuses primarily on how automation can streamline medical claims services to “ensure the right people get paid at the right time, for the right reasons” and working closely with key vendor partners for Medicare Business and IT processes. He has “developed a proven approach for process analysis, optimisation and automation using Agile methodology” which can see savings of over ‘a million dollars per project’.
The collaboration imperative
Many companies fail to respect the importance and complexity of creating a collaboration environment.
“We have developers, testers, project managers, business experts and IT experts,” says Chris.
“If you don’t have either all [of these people] in the room at once, or have them virtually all together at once, you’re often having to do follow-ups. So the first thing we did was elongate that common period to two or four hours a day. If the offshore team are working earlier, in some cases, our business team came in earlier... [This way] they’re off developing, and we’re all moving forward.”
Chris also advocates connecting business and IT departments.
“I’ve put some of our developers on the team, so they’re learning about this technology as well.”
He sees great advantage in having the IT team ‘face inwardly’ to find alternative ways to automate.
Automation and the bottom line
Rapid growth can often complicate a firm's ability to hire people fast enough to cover all the work required. Automation can help businesses upscale quickly, streamlining processes and allowing people to be “repurposed” for “higher value, more meaningful work”.
Automation leads to more than just cost and revenue benefits. It enables staff to become better skilled in more meaningful areas by reducing the time used on repetitive tasks. This mitigates the risk of human error in these monotonous tasks which can cause unnecessary losses.
To find out more about how RPA is propelling the medical insurance industry forward, how processes are implemented and – most importantly – which tool suite Chris likes to use, and why, click below to listen to the full podcast: