NHS Trust launches Robotic Process Automation Centre of Excellence

Chelsea and Westminster NHS Foundation Trust CFO Sandra Easton said that RPA at the Trust could provide a blueprint for a broader NHS rollout

Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, which employs around 6,000 staff caring for nearly one million people, is launching a Centre of Excellence (CoE) for robotic process automation (RPA) technology that is being rolled out across the Trust's corporate services section.

While the long-term vision is to provide a pathway to wider RPA adoption within the NHS, Sandra Easton, chief financial officer at the Trust, explained that usage of the technology is currently at a very low level within her organisation.

"Until now our use of RPA has been very minimal," said Easton. "As a sector, the NHS is very risk averse because everything we do is evidence based, there's science behind it.

"But we've seen lots of things happening in RPA in other industries. I had an opportunity to look at a finance department in different sector a year ago, and I saw how useful RPA can be.

I've got a finance accountant who spends three to four days per month doing VAT returns, and correcting errors. We've now automated a third of that work

"It needs to come into the NHS in a safe environment in the back office. We need to prove that it works, and it's safe, and give ourselves the opportunity to set up governance and structure around how we use and implement it. Once we've got evidence and proof we can take it more towards patient-facing parts of our service," she added.

A unified approach to RPA

While there are some small pockets of RPA usage across the 200 other NHS Trusts in the UK, there is no joined up or systematic approach to its implementation. Easton acknowledged that the NHS encourages its various bodies to run their organisations in their own way to an extent, but argued that its RPA strategy should be more coherent.

"The NHS is one big family, but we allow a thousand flowers to bloom, as every hospital and patient is different. But with RPA, it makes sense to have one approach in the NHS.

"So that's why we're setting up a showcase site to demonstrate how to use this technology in our sector, and we're developing the skills and knowledge in the CoE that allows us to use it as a coherent approach for rest of NHS."

Next we want to start to move the technology more towards patients. At the moment have huge teams whose sole job is to schedule patients for appointments or operations

The Trust is kicking off its own RPA implementations amongst three back office teams: finance and procurement, which counts as one team, HR and informatics.

"We're getting people trained up in all of those teams, and giving them free rein to solve problems they need to solve, they know what's ripe for automation. We're seeing some really big impact processes automated initially.

"One of early ones is our VAT reporting. VAT in NHS is very complex. I've got a finance accountant who spends three to four days per month doing VAT returns, and correcting errors. We've now automated a third of that work, which turned out to be very quick and easy to do. That's a day a month released form that person's workload," added Easton.

Releasing time, not people

Easton explained that the aim for every RPA project within her organisation is to release people's time in order to create more value to the business. In other words, it's not about looking to reduce staff numbers.

"At moment we're saying you can use RPA to add more value to the business. For people we're training in the CoE, that's a day each month that we've released, which will be invested into creating new bots in other areas.

"We also have finance business partners, and their role is to support our decision making. At the moment they have to spend time correcting data errors and uploading material. These are manual tasks, and if we automate that, that's more support we can give to the business."

This chimes with the view of an expert panel at Computing's Cloud & Infrastructure event in 2018.

James Dening, VP & European RPA Evangelist, Automation Anywhere, the Trust's partner for the creation of the Centre of Excellence, explained that RPA isn't often used as a way to reduce headcount.

"Typically we're not seeing our customers making redundancies. Instead they look to the bits of people's jobs that are repetitive, so we're taking the robot out of the human. Take away that dull stuff people do, and give them back time to find other ways to bring value to the business. That's a morale booster, it increases employee satisfaction."

The Trust decided to use Automation Anywhere to help create the CoE after putting an open tender out to the industry.

"We took a different approach to finding a partner. We made a call for innovation, and put that out to the market. We said we want to get into this space, we know there's technology to help us solve it, come to us with solutions. We had 21 organisations respond asking to work with us. Of those, we asked six to come in and talk to us, and Automation Anywhere was one of those.

"One thing which struck us was how well they aligned to our values."

NHS Trust launches Robotic Process Automation Centre of Excellence

Chelsea and Westminster NHS Foundation Trust CFO Sandra Easton said that RPA at the Trust could provide a blueprint for a broader NHS rollout

The future for RPA in the NHS

Easton continued, explaining what she wants from RPA over the next two years: "I would hope for all of the implementations we started with RPA to be completed. Next we want to start to move the technology more towards patients. At the moment have huge teams whose sole job is to schedule patients for appointments or operations.

"This technology could make their lives so much easier. And the technology will advance over the next one to two years, and we'll be doing things we haven't even thought of yet."

Given that this is planned to be an example of how RPA could work in the broader NHS, how will Easton get the word out among such a huge, diverse and dispersed organisation?

We're adding cognitive capabilities onto the automation functionality. That means machine learning capabilities, document classification and natural language processing

"We've got 200 independent organisations in the NHS. The approach is very much making sure there's a high level of visibility around what I'm doing. There are a number of ways I'm doing that, including presenting to various NHS groups I'm part of. I'm also working with Automation Anywhere to get them going to other Trusts and showcasing what we're doing."

It's common for RPA projects to be run by the IT department, which is happening at Leeds Building Society. Easton explained that things are different in her organisation, principally because of a lack of capacity within her IT department.

"My IT team and our CIO are rolling out new Electronic Patient Records. That is a huge task, so they don't have capacity to do this. Also the passion and drive for RPA is in my team. The technology interface has just been about finding a server to put RPA solutions on, that's the only IT involvement."

The future for RPA

Automation Anywhere's Dening said that the future of their RPA product is to add cognitive capabilities.

"We're adding cognitive capabilities onto the automation functionality. That means machine learning capabilities, document classification and natural language processing, to name just some of the new functions.

"The aim is to give organisations ways to deal with the enormous amounts of unstructured and semi-structured data they have. We want to let customers scale and grow their automation deployments, and achieve even bigger returns on investment.

"The second big area is our bot store. That's a way of letting organisations share their RPA tools. Think about what really kick-started smartphones, it was their appstores. It's the same for automation.

"Nothing's new under the sun, and someone else will have a similar environment to you. So you expose that technology to other organisations, which supercharges automation for certain companies.

"What Sandra's doing here, she can take the IP she's building and expose it to other trusts," Dening concluded.

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