Hutt Valley DHB: time handed back to clinical support staff.

About Hutt Valley DHB

Hutt Valley DHB’s Robotic Process Automation (RPA) journey began in 2016. Demand to provide higher levels of clinical, administrative support was stretching current resourcing. The opportunity was to find a technology solution that could reduce the manual effort while working within the existing complex systems and architecture.

The challenge

From the work queue, e-referral registration and processing require manual administration to complete the registration in two primary systems (Concerto and WebPAS). The manual administration process comprises of 37 individual steps.

Manually registering e-referrals consumes on average over 8 hours of skilled labour every day. Manually processing e-referrals consumes on average over 4 hours of skilled labour every day.

The solution: Blue Prism RPA

Most importantly the pilot was designed to realise immediate value, specifically releasing time back to clinical support staff and improve processing quality.

Robotic Process Automation is applied to automate the collection of e-referrals from specialist service queues in Concerto and complete the registration in target systems WebPAS and Concerto. The process is scheduled to run automatically at 6:00 pm daily, processing any registrations found autonomously and unattended.

Any registrations which can’t be completed based on the business rules applied, or system exceptions, are referred to the human workforce for assessment via an exception report. Audit logs are created for each action taken, providing staff with full auditability for all referrals which are completed by Robotic Process Automation.

Pilot results

During the pilot, over 1,200 e-referral registrations and processing transactions were successfully completed releasing over 127 hours back to the organisation.

The success rate of straight-through processing of the Robotic Automation solution was over 83% for the registration process and over 75% for the processing process.

What changed

The e-referrals process has now been operating in full production for over twelve months. As at May 2018, twenty-two clinical services are now addressable through Robotic Automation.

The end-to-end process of manually registering and processing e-referrals is estimated to require over 4,600 hours annually, or the equivalent of 2-2.5 full-time employees.

e-Referrals are processed with 100% compliance to business rules eliminating human error. A repetitive and menial task has been automated allowing skilled workforce members to focus on more engaging and customer focussed tasks.