Automation Anywhere and Northampton General Hospital NHS Trust (NGH) are collaborating on a series of white papers that outline their vision of how automation can serve as a force for good across the global healthcare industry and public sector.
The white papers will focus on the human impact of RPA and how, in combination with AI, cloud, and other technologies, it can help healthcare systems work smarter, not harder, and save organisations like the NHS millions of hours of time annually.
The papers will also draw on NGH and Automation Anywhere’s deep levels of expertise and experience in using RPA to automate tedious, repetitive healthcare processes, freeing staff to work focus on innovations that improve patient outcomes.
Tremaine Richard-Noel, head of emerging technology at NGH, said: “After working together to build individual automations at the NHS, Automation Anywhere co-founder and social impact officer Neeti Mehta Shukla and I realised that our organisations shared a vision for how RPA can revolutionise healthcare. With this new series of white papers, we are sharing this vision with healthcare leaders around the world, providing them with the knowledge they need to begin using automation to solve the challenges facing their own healthcare organisations.”
In March 2020, NGH used Automation Anywhere’s cloud-native Automation 360 platform to develop an automation for 24/7 monitoring of oxygen supply levels during the pandemic. Although NGH did not anticipate any issues with the oxygen supply, it was concerned that an increase in oxygen demand driven by COVID-19 might sap staff time away from other types of patient care and wanted to ensure oxygen readings were accurate at a time when oxygen was being used so extensively by patients.
Working in conjunction with Automation Anywhere and technology services provider boxxe, in just 12 hours the NGH team created an automation that allowed them to monitor oxygen levels 24 hours a day without human intervention and with 100 percent data accuracy. This enabled the hospital to repurpose precious staff time during the height of the pandemic and saved more than 1,500 total hours of staff time over the course of the year.
Neeti Mehta Shukla, co-founder and social impact officer at Automation Anywhere, said: “Technology serves but one purpose: human enablement. RPA and AI fulfil the promise of putting patient and front-line-worker experiences into clear focus. As NGH’s use of RPA and this series of white papers makes clear, these technologies save time, improve process accuracy, and make the impossible possible for people and organisations everywhere. This is especially important in healthcare, where RPA’s impact can literally save lives.”
The first white paper in the series, “RPA: a force for good in healthcare”, written by the two organisations with input from Dr Patrice Seuwou at the University of Northampton, is available now and can be downloaded here.
