Developing RPA Capabilities in Healthcare
CASE STUDY
Helping a digital Healthcare provider build an internal RPA Automation capability
Introducing RPA
CRF Health (now Signant Health) engaged Lean Consulting to help them introduce Automation into their organisation. We supported them with selection of the right RPA software (in this case UiPath) that best suited their needs and rapidly built a Proof of Concept.
Within 2 months, Lean Consulting had delivered the Proof of Concept which automated the process for de-registration of survey participants once the survey had concluded. This time-consuming task was now able to be completed without human intervention, ensuring their data was always up to date.
Build a pipeline of opportunities
It’s not enough to prove RPA works, you need to start building a pipeline of potential automation candidates. Our Lean consultants spent time observing processes in each of their main operational areas to understand where there were opportunities to augment processing with RPA. Critically, we didn’t approach this from an automation perspective only, but a wider process improvement lens that included RPA & automation as options for improvement.
From here we were able to build list of automation candidates that truly showed the potential of RPA in the organisation and helped make a compelling business case to deploy RPA in the organisation properly.
Delivering Value
One of several automated processes we delivered for CRF Health was to automate Status Reports. CRF Health deliver hundreds of medical trials for their clients and the Status Report was taking an average of 66 minutes per report.
Lean Consulting worked with CRF Health’s Process Improvement team to improve the original process as well as design and create the automation to build the Study Status Reports. The automation reduced the average build time for a single report to 10 minutes.
Once the automation was up and running, Lean Consulting assisted in early Go-Live support and maintenance to help troubleshoot if there were any unexpected errors. Over 50% of Studies are now part of the scheme as of November 2018 and in the first 3 years is forecasted to save CRF Health a total of £1.14m.
Building internal Capability
To ensure that CRF Health’s RPA journey was to be sustainable, we helped them build a plan to develop their internal knowledge base around RPA. This meant hiring a couple of developers and a business analyst to train-up and completing appropriate handovers of the RPA projects. Lean Consulting advised on the hiring of RPA developers and helped to nurture and upskill the new hires.
Achieving Scale with RPA
Once CRF Health had several stable and consistent automation, Lean Consulting implemented & configured UiPath Orchestrator and worked with CRF Health to ensure the infrastructure was set-up correctly.
UiPath Orchestrator is vital for the larger RPA operations and has allowed CRF Health to schedule their automation, enabling them to utilize otherwise untouched times of the day for carrying out work. It also reduces the amount of time required to manage the operating of each automation.
