When one of the 600,000 citizens living the southeast of Wales needs healthcare, it’s the NHS Aneurin Bevan Health Board that provides it. During admission, or when patients change wards or are discharged, updates were made into the Health Board Clinical Portal. But to get this information into the Welsh Patient Administration System (PAS), information had to be entered manually, causing significant delays and potential mistakes. The Welsh NHS Health Board had to find a faster way to keep its patient records up to date, which it did when they gave the job to Blue Prism digital workers.

Challenge

Hospitals are busy places. There’s a constant stream of patients being admitted and discharged. And as people’s conditions change, or hospital capacity fluctuates, patients are moved from one ward to another. To keep track, Aneurin Bevan’s clinical staff were manually inputting all this data into the Health Board Clinical Portal. However, this portal is not directly integrated with the Welsh PAS. Transferring information to the PAS required staff members to manually transcribe it. On average, it was taking 24 hours for each record to be updated into the PAS, and if a change was made on a weekend or public holiday it could take even longer. The consequence was Aneurin Bevan’s clinical staff lacked up-to-date patient records, which was creating unnecessary frustration for clinical staff.

Solution

Aneurin Bevan is dedicated to providing high-quality healthcare and having up-to-date patient information that is critical to delivering a positive patient experience. So, the Health Board turned to Blue Prism digital workers who could quickly update the patient records in both systems. Working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, the digital workers are now updating the Welsh PAS in just 5 to 10 minutes per change. Using workstations and tablets, clinical staff can now access all relevant patient data as they need it.

This solution also enables the implementation of new systems such as the Welsh Nursing Care Record which rely on Welsh PAS to provide up to date admission information.

But for Aneurin Bevan, the benefits of intelligent automation potentially go much further. Opting for a Blue Prism in the Cloud solution, Aneurin Bevan have the vision to share automations and processes with other Health Boards across Wales through a dedicated digital exchange.