CASE STUDY
A
s the NHS looks for ways to
consolidate and digitise health
services, it has rolled out initiatives
to enhance patient outcomes. Alongside this,
the ‘Paper switch off’ programme started
on October 1, 2018, meaning all healthcare
services within the UK have had to switch
all GP referrals to be processed via the
Electronic Referral Service (eRS). Given these
priorities, NHS Trusts like ESNEFT wanted
to ensure they were on the front foot and
make that digital change away from paper-
based activities. The switch over to eRS was
performed without hindrance, but this did
not resolve the underlying problem.
The process structure around referrals at
ESNEFT was both manual and laborious.
After a patient had visited their GP and
been referred to the Trust, up to 15 pieces
of data on information such as scans,
blood tests and other results were manually
downloaded and printed by hospital staff.
Once printed, the information was collated
by staff members, scanned into one PDF
document and uploaded as a single PDF
into the Kainos Evolve administration
system. As you can imagine, the time
taken to perform this tedious process was
considerable (circa 20 minutes per referral)
and if you combine this with volume
of referrals to the Trust, this created an
admin avalanche which detracted medical
secretaries from supporting consultants
and patients.
Not only was the manual process slow, it
also cost the Trust around £220,000 per
year to maintain. This was a culmination of
direct costs such as ink and paper as well
as time spent by staff on this task. ESNEFT
identified that it needed to find a way to
resolve this for essential enhancements to
patient experience.
ESNEFT had started working with
Thoughtonomy on a pilot automation
programme based around the accounts
payable back office process. As a result,
the Trust started to look at other areas to
utilise its Virtual Workforce. ESNEFT saw
the potential of the Thoughtonomy Virtual
Workforce platform to automate the GP
referrals process across all specialties. The
target was to make the pre-grading part
of referral process fully automated and
in parallel, exceed expectations on NHS
digital switch over initiatives. Working in
partnership with ESNEFT’s automation
team, Thoughtonomy specialists set about
deploying the Virtual Workforce platform to
automate the 2,000 referrals that typically
came into the Trust each week.
Virtual Workers now actively monitor
incoming eRS referrals from GP patient
appointments in real-time, 24 hours a
day. When received, the Virtual Workers
trigger the automation process to begin
immediately. Once triggered, the Virtual
Worker extracts the reason for referral,
referral data and supporting clinical
information, and merges the information
into a single PDF document. When the
document has been combined into
a singular format, the Virtual Worker
is provided with highly secure access
to upload the PDF into the Trust’s
administrative systems using virtual smart
card technology – all completed within
minutes. The Virtual Workforce is able
to update all systems instantaneously,
including Kainos Evolve, and extract critical
information which it passes on to the lead
consultant for review and grading.
Since its recent creation, the Trust has taken
guidance from a new philosophy, ‘Time
Matters’; a principle that is clearly represented
NHS TRUSTS LIKE ESNEFT
WANTED TO ENSURE THEY WERE ON
THE FRONT FOOT AND MAKE THAT
DIGITAL CHANGE AWAY FROM PAPER-
BASED ACTIVITIES.
64
INTELLIGENTCIO
in this project. With the flick of a switch,
Virtual Workers have sprung into action to
deliver automation of the GP referrals process,
reducing the time taken from 20 minutes to
just five minutes. The Virtual Workers have
also released medical secretaries’ time to
perform more value-added and vocational
tasks such as patient interaction or driving
forward internal improvements. In the first
three months of launch across five clinical
specialities, ESNEFT released 500 hours of
time, reduced spend on agency staff, cut
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