Case Study 02
Automating Case Assignment for a Pathology Team
Scheduling work that has to respect availability, subspecialty, and human judgment. Automation with a review step in the middle, not instead of one.
Client Profile
The pathology division of the same national cancer diagnostics laboratory featured in RCM Automation. This work sits outside billing entirely: clinical operations, where the constraint is specialist capacity rather than claim volume.
The Challenge
Every case had to be assigned to a director who was both available and qualified to read it. That meant holding two moving pictures in mind at once: who is working, and who has the subspecialty depth for this case.
The assignment ran on institutional knowledge held by a small number of coordinators, rebuilt by hand as caseload and schedules shifted. It consumed hours that were not clinical work, and it created a single point of failure whenever a coordinator was out.
This was not a billing problem. It was a workflow problem that happened to sit in a clinical department, which is where most automation projects stall: the judgment involved makes teams reluctant to hand the decision to software.
What We Did
We built a two-step process with a deliberate human checkpoint between the steps, so the team reviews the proposal before anything is committed to their system.
Step 01
Generate the proposed schedule
A coordinator starts the process. It reads director availability and skills, matches them against the cases waiting to be assigned, and produces a proposed schedule as a spreadsheet the team already knows how to read.
Step 02
Review, then commit
The coordinator checks the proposal against how they would have assigned the cases themselves and adjusts anything that does not match. Once approved, the second process writes the assignments into the pathology case management system.
The checkpoint is the reason it was adopted. The automation does the assembly, which is the part that took hours. The team keeps the judgment, which is the part they were never going to give up.
Results
- Schedule building moved from manual coordination to a reviewed proposal, so coordinator time goes to exceptions rather than to assembling the whole schedule.
- Assignment logic now lives in a documented process instead of in one person's head, so coverage no longer depends on who is in that day.
- Directors are matched on availability and subspecialty consistently, using the same rules every cycle.
- The team retained final say on every assignment, which is what made a clinical department willing to automate at all.
Outcome statements describe the delivered mechanism. Time and volume figures for this workflow have not yet been confirmed against client-verified data.
Why it Matters
Most of the manual work in a healthcare organization is not in billing. It is in coordination: who does what, when, with which information, and the spreadsheets that hold it together.
The method that works in revenue cycle works here too. Map the real workflow, standardize it, automate the assembly, and leave the judgment with the people who own the outcome.
Lets start a conversation
If your team is coordinating work in a spreadsheet that only one person really understands, that is usually a good place to start.
Start a conversationCercaLabs Inc.
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