Performance, Scalability and Maintenance: An Experimental Study of RPA vs. Autonomous Agents in the Healthcare Domain
Daniel Schulz, Pedro Cabral Buchaim, Bernardo Soares, Fernando Rafael Ensslin Schwengber, Lorenzo Farias, Daniela Duarte da Silva Bagatini, Ana Paula Wernz da Cunha Müller
原文摘要
Healthcare information systems are fragmented, and retrieving data from legacy web portals is a recurrent need. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is deterministic but sensitive to interface changes, whereas autonomous agents based on large language models (Agent Process Automation, APA) promise adaptability at a higher computational cost. Following Design Science Research, we developed and compared an RPA solution (Playwright) and an APA solution (browser-use, LangGraph and Gemini 2.5 Flash-lite) to retrieve mammography and breast ultrasound reports from a laboratory portal, treating reports solely as informational artifacts. Across two rounds (T and T+7), RPA reached 98.90% accuracy and 98.27% F1-score versus 96.49% and 94.48% for APA, was about 13 times faster (16.07 s vs. 207.21 s per patient) and cost about six times less per report (USD 0.030 vs. 0.187). Both reached 100% step success rates; APA varied more over time. For a stable interface, RPA was superior.
cs.AI · cs.SE