How the NHS is adopting technology to support new ways of working

The unprecedented pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic has stretched resources and capacity to extremes. The NHS has changed its operating model to manage the situation and is now looking to maintain a more flexible and scalable workforce. To ensure the service is sustained safely and reliably through peaks of demand and future crisis scenarios, the vision of operational flexibility and scalability supported by reliable data and efficient digital processes must become a reality.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, waiting lists and pressures on resources have been increasing, indicating that the demand for healthcare services is on the rise. To not only manage, but also meet, the high demand for NHS services, whilst continuing to operate in a COVID-19 secure way, the NHS will have to adopt new ways of working to maintain and improve patient outcomes.

The NHS is challenged to deliver world-class services to an ever-increasing number of patients, with increasingly complex co-morbidity health problems. This places strain upon staff to continue to deliver high levels of care, which is compounded by pressures on recruitment, retention and resources.

What is Intelligent Automation?

Intelligent Automation (also referred to as Robotic Process Automation, or ‘RPA’) is a platform of technologies that is used to ‘intelligently’ automate manual, time-intensive and repetitive tasks across many different Trust services. Automation has significant potential application across a large number of Clinical and Corporate Services thereby supporting the Trusts’ objectives to be financially sustainable and deliver against efficiency and productivity targets.

This technology supports system-wide interoperability and can help achieve the goal of sharing real-time data across the organisations by connecting systems via RPA technology.

There are many repetitive administration processes in use across the organisations that require clinical and non-clinical staff to repeatedly access, review and take action on information presented.

The processes often require unnecessary data entry duplication across multiple forms or systems, a paper-based output to facilitate the transfer of information from one system to another, and there is little automation in place to reuse data, improve quality and reduce the amount of time taken administering processes. The wide mix of internally hosted and external systems in use adds to the process complexities and inefficiencies and contributes to an overall poor user experience.

The repetitive and inefficient processes unnecessarily occupy staff entering, manipulating and checking information and can only be sustained at scale by adding significant extra resource (and cost) or taking valuable resource and time away from delivering against the wider organisational objectives.

RPA software consists of software robots (‘Digital Workers’) that are specifically programmed to execute a task or series of tasks by mimicking a human’s actions – then executing those actions almost instantly. These Digital Workers follow pre-programmed rules, so are not subject to human error. They work at machine speed, 24 hours a day and 365 days per year and they do not get sick. One Digital Worker has the equivalent productivity as 8 full-time staff doing the same tasks.

 Benefits of Automation

There are many repetitive clinical and non-clinical administration processes in use across NHS Trusts that require our clinical and non-clinical staff to repeatedly access, review and take action on information presented. The processes often require unnecessary data entry duplication across multiple forms or systems, a paper-based output to facilitate the transfer of information from one system to another, and there is little automation in place to reuse data, improve quality and reduce the amount of time taken administering processes. The typical mix of internally hosted and external systems in use adds to the process complexities and inefficiencies, causes data integrity issues and contributes to a poor user experience.

The repetitive and inefficient processes unnecessarily occupy staff who are entering, manipulating and checking information, which can only be sustained at scale by increasing staff numbers (and cost) or taking valuable resources and time away from staff delivering against wider NHS and Trust objectives. 

 Adoption of automation within the NHS has delivered many significant benefits, including:

·      Delivery of significant productivity and efficiency savings;

·      Reduction of Staff / Agency Spend – and prevention of an increase in this spend expected for the COVID-19 response;

·      Significant ROI delivered through adopting automation processes and routines which save the Trust money, avoid the incurring of additional costs and gives valuable time back to existing staff to focus on the Trust’s strategic objectives;

·      Streamlining and automation of manual processes;

·      Improvement in the quality of data integrity and reduction of errors;

·      Improves staff morale, enriches staff roles and reduces sickness rates;

·      Minimising the accumulation of both BAU and COVID-19 backlogs to achieve maximum productivity;

·      Provision of essential real-time data to Trust users more quickly, 24/7 seven days per week;

·      Assists with data compliance and reporting requirements and reduces manual duplication of information processing;

·      Extends the life of existing legacy IT systems that are difficult to interface and integrate with other systems, avoids replacing some systems and associated API costs;

·      Collates information from multiple IT systems and shares data with other systems more efficiently e.g., clinical diagnostic test results from various sources, patient handover to social care;

Note: the list above is merely some of the key benefits and is by no means exhaustive.

Benefits of working towards an ICS adoption model

As many Trusts are now operating in an Integrated Care System, working as a region brings many benefits to the individual organisations as well as the region as a whole. Whilst there are good examples of collaboration across the NHS, there is a need to increase efficiencies, remove barriers and support patient care throughout the region. The collaborative approach will deliver commercial economies of scale, facilitate and enable sharing of regional and wider NHS best practice and processes, improve data integrity and information sharing across the region, and deliver greater return on investment (ROI) than if procuring as individual stand-alone organisations.