University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS FT has introduced Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technology from Blue Prism.
The technology is being used in the maternity department to search, download and print women’s blood test results for antenatal and newborn screening programmes when the are available.
The trust said the technology is saving up to two hours a day, removing the need for the team to do this process manually.
Lynn Baines, Antenatal and Newborn Screening Co-ordinator said: “It’s just been great because it has saved me so much time which can be used to spend more time caring for women.”
“Each woman has three reports so when I had to do this manually it could take up to two hours a day. The RPA searches the portal three times a day using NHS numbers and identifiers and prints off the reports. This has improved women’s safety as it reduces the risk of results being missed.”
Marc Hadwin, Head of Digital Services, said: “By introducing the RPA we are improving the safety around this process and reducing the risk of error and delay that can occur during the manual transfer of data between systems which is used to manage the woman’s journey.”
“An added benefit of the RPA is that it also gives Lynn an extra two hours a day to focus on caring for women.”
“The next steps for the Trust and the I3 Department is to introduce an RPA which will automatically upload results onto each woman’s Electronic Patient Record.”
The trust said it is looking to introduce RPA for up to 300 other systems going forward. The technology utilises established rules and structured data to automate process to trigger responses, the trust said would be ‘ideal for labour-intensive work’.
