Robotic Process Automation giving midwives more time to care

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – Blue Prism – which searches for, downloads and prints women’s blood test results for antenatal and newborn screening programmes has been introduced at University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust’s (UHMBT) Maternity Department.

Prior to the RPA being introduced, Lynn Baines, the Trust’s Antenatal and Newborn Screening Co-ordinator, would have had to go into the Newcastle Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust laboratory portal and manually search for a woman’s reports, download and print the results.

The new cloud-based software is saving Lynn up to two hours every day giving her more time to spend caring for women and their families.

The Trust has approximately 3,200 births every year and up to 50% of women will take up a blood screening programme for Down’s syndrome, Edwards’ syndrome and Patau's syndrome.

Lynn said: “It’s just been great because it has saved me so much time which can be used to spend more time caring for women.

“Each woman has three reports so when I had to do this manually it could take up to two hours a day. The RPA searches the portal three times a day using NHS numbers and identifiers and prints off the reports. This has improved women’s safety as it reduces the risk of results being missed.”

Marc Hadwin, Head of Digital Services, said: “By introducing the RPA we are improving the safety around this process and reducing the risk of error and delay that can occur during the manual transfer of data between systems which is used to manage the woman’s journey. 

“An added benefit of the RPA is that it also gives Lynn an extra two hours a day to focus on caring for women.

“The next steps for the Trust and the I3 Department is to introduce an RPA which will automatically upload results onto each woman’s Electronic Patient Record.”

The Trust is looking to introduce RPAs for up to 300 other systems which will save time, improve patient safety and experience.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a technology that utilises pre-defined business logic, established rules and structured data to automate business processes. Software robots built on RPA are able to capture and interpret applications for processing a transaction, manipulating data, triggering responses and communicating with other digital systems. Robotic Process Automation is the ideal technology for many labour-intensive knowledge work. It handles repetitive, and rule-based, large volume tasks particularly well.

You can find out more about Blue Prism at HERE