Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust has piloted process automation technology from Cloud21.
The trust started the programme in July 2019 to explore the use of process automation in clerking clinics using the UiPath platform and to explore replacing manual administration process with technology.
Neil Perry, director of digital transformation “I’ve worked in systems integration and clinical system development for over 20 years and despite leaps in technology we still experience problems integrating systems, particularly where processes have evolved in the hospital.”
“The need to integrate services across the wider health system is growing in priority. I’ve been watching the progress of process automation over the last few years and wanted to understand if it could help us provide a seamless best of breed solution for our clinicians.”
The trust explored whether the technology could support the automation of tasks and be used with their current systems.
Neil said “We will start by automating some of the back-office functions within older applications which have limited integration capability. These serve us well and we would not want to switch out, but we do need to address the areas that lack interoperability.”
“The proof of concept demonstrated we can use software robots to determine whether patients are for follow-up or discharged, for example. There are also longstanding integration issues with national infrastructure solutions like the e-RS which has not been designed to support the efficiencies needed within the acute setting. In this case we receive documentation daily that needs to be manually organised for clinics and we are looking to process automation with advanced analytics to do this for us. I see this as intelligent automation, which I think is key to the future of healthcare delivery.”
“Cloud21’s experience in this area is helping us to understand how we might enable patients to manage their health proactively with the support of chatbots and natural language understanding platforms. Initially, we could see chatbots that can simulate conversation with users, either in voice or text, for scheduling appointments for example. However, we can go beyond this. We want to investigate the use of several technologies alongside personal health records, with integration to patients’ consumer health systems like MyFitnessPal, Fitbits and Apple watches. This opens enormous opportunities to assist patients to self-manage long term conditions or short-term illnesses and help coordinate the various interactions with the health and care system.”
Neil presented ‘Innovating Pathways through Radiology AI, Wearables for Remote Patient Monitoring, Robotics & ChatBots’ as part of HTN Digital Week in January 2020, watch the presentation here:
