Connect Health is the largest independent musculoskeletal (MSK) and pain services provider in the UK. It supports the NHS to effectively and efficiently deliver care in more appropriate community settings, transforming services around specific quality and financial objectives, dramatically reducing waiting times and improving outcomes for patients. Connect Health has embarked on an intelligent automation journey to streamline the patient experience and give time back to their clinical and admin staff.

Challenge

Connect Health is a leading community services healthcare provider encompassing mental health, IAPT, rehabilitation, physiotherapy, tier-2 MSK, chronic pain, functional disorders/long Covid, First Contract Practitioners (FCP), rheumatology and occupational health services. The provider serves over 375,000 NHS patients across 50+ NHS Clinical Commission Groups/Trusts and 100+ occupational health physiotherapy services.

With such a wide range of services and patients, Connect Health found that increasing demand was constantly outstripping supply and that processes were slow and prone to error thanks to a lack of native integration capabilities. This meant that clinical and admin staff faced an uphill battle managing low value, highly repetitive data entry and migration tasks that took them away from high-value activities like patient interaction.

Solution

Connect Health quickly set to work automating the Patient Pathways Cycle, which spans from referral, right through to discharge. Working between the hospital/GP internal systems (including ERS, PhysioNow, and SystmOne), Blue Prism digital workers have been able to relieve staff from the mundane and highly repetitive tasks involved in the patient pathway cycle, allowing them to focus on patient care. By emulating the same steps normally taken by human members of the team, digital workers have enabled the referral process to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, meaning referrals are actioned when they come in and avoiding backlogs. 

They’ve also been put to work processing patient outcomes, sending patient communications, scheduling further and follow-up appointments, and completing the 13-step safety check to ensure patients are discharged correctly.