Introduction
Mid Essex Hospital Services NHS Trust provides a comprehensive range of acute and community-based services. It also hosts regional plastics, head and neck upper gastrointestinal surgical services and a supra-regional burns service to a population of 9.8 million.
The Trust, based in the heart of Essex county (UK), employs over 3,800 staff and provides services from five sites in and around Chelmsford, Maldon and Braintree. The main site is Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford, which has been redeveloped as part of a £148 million Private Finance Initiative. The whole organization enjoys a strong clinical reputation and provides a wide range of services including A&E, emergency medical and surgery, elective surgery in most specialties, and maternity and pediatric services.
About the Project
In late 2010, the Mid Essex Hospital Services NHS Trust was looking into new and innovative ways to enhance the patient’s experience when arriving at the hospital. After evaluating a number of approaches, the Trust decided to implement an enhanced patient-flow and self-service kiosk solution using robotic process automation (RPA).
“We already had integration technologies available to us, but we didn’t have 100% coverage of all applications and we didn’t have the capability to write back data into our Patient Administration System,” said Kate Thompson, ICT Director Mid Essex Hospital Services NHS Trust.
Role and Value of Blue Prism
The Trust chose UK-based Intouch with Health to provide the self-service kiosk. As part of the overall solution, they needed to integrate and connect the self-service kiosks to the Trust’s existing Patient Administration System (PAS). Blue Prism provided the proven capability to integrate with the kiosks. Thompson and her team then began a process of evaluating other potential benefits beyond the ability to integrate with the self-service kiosks.
“I wanted to develop best practice systems architecture and reduce the reliance on the PAS by having an effective integration strategy to connect between Trust data sets and local clinical systems,” said Thompson.
Thompson and her team were so impressed with the Blue Prism solution that they elected for a Trust-wide license that enables them to cover unlimited integration and process automation opportunities throughout the Trust. In the near future, the Trust is looking at new clinical and procedural applications including enhancing 18-week RFT reporting.
“Blue Prism complements and extends our existing integration capabilities to include any application, written in any technology and provided by any supplier. Complementing our existing solutions, we now have 100% integration capability. Blue Prism’s enterprise strength technology really underpins our future strategy,” added Thompson. “We are reviewing all our IT systems and are looking to see where we can rationalize and consolidate applications. There will be a greater need to use patient-centered systems.”
In addition to Blue Prism providing a comprehensive integration capability, it was also recognized that the platform can help save public money by extending the life of older asset. Using existing assets saves money and delays the need to spend money replacing systems. Since the Trust is supported by public taxes, this capability saves the public money.
“The service from Blue Prism has been excellent, and we have learned about the capabilities of the software. We can understand how it works and because of our Blue Prism training, we will be able to self-serve after we complete our accreditation process,” concluded Thompson.
Solution Summary
NHS Realizes Benefits from Blue Prism During the implementation of the first project with Blue Prism, the Mid Essex Hospital Services NHS Trust recognized the following benefits for the Blue Prism solution:
- Blue Prism was a very quick and adaptive way to integrate, which made it cost effective.
- The software provides full attendance tracking rather than auditing – it allows the Trust to monitor how efficiently its patient-care processes are operating.
- Blue Prism is an enterprise platform – delivering robustness, scalability, audit and management information (MI).
- Blue Prism complements existing integration technology to cover 100% of integration needs.
- The whole project took between eight and ten weeks to complete.
- Advanced error tracking enables the Trust to identify any problems quickly.
- Management reporting has been very valuable with supporting MI from the hospital and the clinic.
To learn more about what Blue Prism RPA can do for your organization, contact us today!
