After University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust launched a successful self-registration process, they were interested in automating new processes. With the Blue Prism platform already in place, the trust was able to automate new processes using robotic process automation (RPA), such as patient record reconciliation and pharmacy stock control updates, in just a few weeks.
Introduction
University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB) is the leading university teaching hospital in the West Midlands. It’s one of the most consistently high performing trusts in the NHS and has been rated “excellent” for financial management and “excellent” for quality of clinical and non-clinical services by the Healthcare Commission.
UHB’s new £545 million Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham was opened in 2011. UHB has an annual turnover in excess of £425 million, employs around 6,900 staff and provides a widerange of services to more than half a million patients every year. The Trust is a regional center for cancer, trauma, burns and plastics, and has the largest solid organ transplantation program in Europe.
UHB is a highly innovative trust and as such is constantly looking for ways to improve patient care, patient service and increase operational efficiency.
UHB introduced the first ever patient self-administration kiosk in a NHS Trust hospital using the National Program for IT (NPfIT) Patient Administration System (PAS). It was successfully integrated into the NPfIT system using Blue Prism software. Building on this very successful project, Steve Chilton, Director of IT Services at UHB, decided to develop their own internal Blue Prism configuration and deployment skills and to identify new initiatives for process automation and integration throughout the trust. As part of the trust’s drive to improve patient service, UHB is looking to IT to provide opportunities to streamline, integrate and automate processes. This case study covers further work done by the trust with Blue Prism to automate processes throughout UHB.
“The work Blue Prism did for us on the self-service kiosks clearly demonstrated the power of its operational agility software. Blue Prism successfully allowed us to meet and deliver our own business requirements in the timescales and financial constraints we needed on the kiosks. We could see the value of developing our own in-house skills, which Blue Prism encouraged, to address a whole range of initiatives ourselves with the technology, while getting support from Blue Prism when and if we needed it,” commented Steve Chilton, UHB’s Director of IT Services.
The Value of Blue Prism
Following on from Blue Prism’s successful support of the integration of self-service kiosks, UHB looked to Blue Prism to work on a number of other integration and automation projects. Blue Prism is a “self service” process automation and integration technology. UHB took advantage of Blue Prism’s product configuration and delivery accreditation program by training a number of their staff to develop their in-house Blue Prism Center of Excellence capability.
“The implementation time for this project was just three days and the Blue Prism process completed the reconciliation within a matter of weeks. This was a critical project for us. Keeping the Patient Master Index (PMI) up to date is the number one goal for any Trust because it drives everything we do,” said Dean Grinham, Program Delivery Manager, UHB IT Services. “Using Blue Prism we are now able to complete the data update within minutes and early each morning rather than it only being complete at the end of each day.”
Adding More Projects to their RPA Mix
Patient Record Reconciliation – Date of Death
The Issue
Many NHS Trusts suffer from the problem that no notification is provided by the Patient demographic Service (PdS) in the event of a significant change of circumstance, such as the death of a patient. This means that, even though a doctor may have informed the PdS of a patient’s death, the hospital may remain uninformed. As a consequence, unnecessary appointments may be held open and potentially upsetting appointment reminders may be sent out.
The Challenge
UHB had circa 50,000 deceased patients’ records to be updated. At one minute per case, this workload of 50,000 corresponded to approximately 6 months of work for a full time employee (FTE). Once a one-off bulk update is completed, the workload is approximately 5000 patients a quarter which would equate to two weeks of work for a single FTE.
The Solution
The Blue Prism process now helps to keep the Patient Master Index (PMI) in the PAS up to date which enables crucial audit and reporting activities to be delivered.
Pharmacy Stock Control Updates
The Issue
The stock control process updates the pharmacy system with updated stock numbers when new stock is ordered in the accounting system, Sage.
The Challenge
The quality of information in the pharmacy system was very poor. There was no reliable means of determining accurate stock numbers and the quality of data was not sufficient for stock trends to be analyzed. There are approximately 200- 300 updates to be fed into the pharmacy system daily, each taking approximately two minutes and requiring an accurate calculation to be performed. This work equates to one FTE.
The Solution
Using Blue Prism, a circular feedback loop process was created which complemented the existing messaging. The alternative proposition from the pharmacy system vendor was for a plugin costing £60K.
Other projects where Blue Prism has been utilized include:
- Outpatient appointment outcomes
- Choose and book document downloads
- NHS jobs data transfer
- HR portal staff record downloads
- Loading testing and system monitoring
“Blue Prism has proven to be fundamental in enabling us to improve patient service, reduce operational costs and speed up key processes without compromising accuracy. We are committed to using Blue Prism software to improve our operational agility and would strongly recommend it to other organizations faced with significant, costly and time-consuming processes that are ripe for automation and to be able to integrate with applications that are too costly to reach with traditional approaches,” said Chilton.
Summary of benefits
- UHB able to develop their own Blue Prism configuration expertise
- Projects delivered in the required timeframes
- Projects cost significantly less than alternative approaches
- Significant reduction in process operating costs
- Improvement in accuracy and “right-first-time” processing
- No changes or operational impact on existing systems
- Enabled the UHB to economically tackle new automation and integration initiatives
- Helped to support the trust’s drive for operational agility
- Reduced pressure on stretched IT resources
KeyMark and Blue Prism Deliver:
- A powerful software platform supported by a knowledgeable and experienced professional services team
- A rapid knowledge transfer and product accreditation program to train and empower end users to configure Blue Prism software
- Many years of deep understanding of business processes and their application in business
- A proven track record of deploying the platform in large and complex organizations
To learn more about what Blue Prism RPA can do for your organization, contact us today!
