Automating Covid-19 processes in the NHS

Challenge

As the Covid-19 pandemic on hospitals started to materialise, TPXimpact was commissioned by the NHSx AI Lab Skunkworks project to undertake a Discovery to determine the suitability of Intelligent Automation (IA) within NHS hospitals and Trusts across England.

When we approached Kettering General Hospital to share with them the benefits of automation and the funding available through Skunkworks to help NHS Trusts trial Intelligent Automation, their Deputy Chief Digital Information Officer immediately recognised the opportunity for this innovative approach in dealing with the reporting of Covid-19.

Each hospital has to create a daily Covid Situational Report — a process which is a requirement of Covid times, in addition to the existing tasks already being processed and one that spans multiple departments across the hospital. It was quickly agreed that it would be an ideal process to automate because of the importance of the report, the need for zero errors and the time intensive nature of it.

The process used and accessed systems across three main areas — Human Resources, the incident room and data from patient admin systems.

Solution

In terms of the first phase in HR, the bot accesses the HR system — Health Roster — reporting on the staff absence records across the hospital related and unrelated to Covid-19. The Blue Prism Cloud bot — we call her Mary Bot — extracts the information from the Health Roster and populates the NHS Digital daily SitRep template. The bot then emails the completed template to the Health Intelligence team for checking and submitting to NHS England at 11am each day, which contributes to the national Covid-19 data collection.

The second and third phases included automating the processes associated with Covid-19 patient data from multiple wards via the incident room and the patient admin systems. Again, validating the necessary information, populating the SitRep template and alerting a member of the Health Intelligence team to verify and upload to the NHS England portal.

Impact

One of the measures used in any RPA work is staff time saving — in part, to help relative judgement of which processes should be automated and partly to support any investment case. The estimate for the hospital’s staff time saving once the full automation project is complete will be 4400 hours saved across all processes per annum and a staffing cost equivalent savings of £153,846.00 over one year. In practice these are not ‘cash releasing’ benefits, but demonstrate the size of the activity on what is an already stretched staff base, and give a sense of the amount of time staff will be able to spend on other tasks as Mary Bot goes about her business!

The plan is to use the processes built here and make them available via the Blue Prism NHS Digital Exchange enabling other Trusts to follow in the innovation at Kettering and benefit from the automation.

As Dr Indra Joshi, Director of AI, NHSX comments below, it's great to see the roadmap for RPA come into fruition:

Following the success of the Proof of Concept, Kettering General Hospital has gone on to invest in five digital workers on the Blue Prism Cloud platform. TPXimpact will design, build and deploy the selected five processes and provide ongoing support over the next two years.

• P1: Register Patient and Admit to ED on Medway PAS
• P2: Patient Call Reminder - outpatient appointments
• P3: Antibody Testing
• P4: Managing COVID Pathology Results
• P5: Clinical Coding