The first session of HTN Summit 2020 we were joined by Hugo Mathias, CIO at Northampton General Hospital NHS Trust for a session focusing on the use of robotic process automation.
Hugo said: “Across the board, there are lots of opportunities to provide automation, and we’ve recognised trying to implement our IT strategy without automation was going to be a very difficult task.”
In order to implement automation, the trust purchased 6 robots to be trained to complete complex logic-based tasks.
The five main areas the robots have been used at the trust are to integrate systems, improve accuracy, increase speed, identify errors, and transform data.
The robots have also been used throughout the Covid-19 pandemic in monitoring oxygen levels.
“The first robot we built was for monitoring oxygen; when Covid kicked-in, our oxygen demand was through the roof and we were worried about how we were going to measure that. The access to the measuring tool was on the internet, meaning someone would have to log in every hour to pick up the oxygen levels.”
“We got the robot to pick that data up and feed that data to the site, then through to the site room on an hourly basis to the dashboard.”
“We were talking to Automation Anywhere about how we can get RPA in, but the problem happened when another trust reached the maximum of their oxygen supply. Our trust panicked that the same would happen to us.”
“We needed to get someone to read the tank every hour, but we knew there would be human error.”
“Automation Anywhere then built the robot for us using the data from the website, putting that data into a spreadsheet, and then created a figure that could feed into our real-time information system.”
“We then had an hourly updated oxygen levels information system, which measures the number of inches of oxygen left in the tank.”
Watch the session here:
