St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust (STHK) has partnered with BP3, who specialise in designing and delivering business process automation programmes.
Implementing BP3’s automation process has seen the trust’s employment services automation programme set up with 139 bots handling 16 processes.
Automation has been used for purposes such as speeding up emailing processes by providing pre-filled information, checking weekly payroll files and supporting data protection through password protecting certain correspondence sent by the trust.
STHK said it has realised benefits such the filing of over 36,000 files to employees’ personal folders; completion of over 2,000 statutory sick pay forms; communication of over 3,600 pension enrolments; and distribution of over 2,700 third party reports to client finance teams.
Staff at the trust have been able to take ownership of the technology and learn to build several processes. A number of staff members have transitioned from the payroll team to becoming robotic process automation developers, due to their active interest in developing the logic for bots.
Mark Ramsay, RPA project manager at STHK, commented: “First and foremost, automation has reduced the time our staff spend on menial tasks, enabling them to undertake more complex quality checks, improve payroll accuracy and achieve a better work-life balance. Secondly, it’s well documented that the NHS faces pressure to continue to deliver excellent patient care, whilst also improving efficiency and reducing cost of back-office functions. With automation, we’re able to optimise the effective use of resources and develop our people at the same time.”
Peter Shergold, BPM/RPA lead consultant at BP3, added: “Citizen development (employees owning and building their own automated processes) is the future of automation, and our collaboration with STHK has focused on the skill-building of staff as well improving quality metrics, service to clients and staff wellbeing with automation. We’re delighted to have helped map the path for STHK to implement additional automation across pay progression and appraisals, bulk uploads, pension data quality and new starters and leavers in the next year.”
