Graeme Fletcher is using RPA to drive improvements in musculoskeletal patient care
Connect Health Chief Information Officer, Graeme Fletcher is responsible for all the technology that underpins the largest independent provider of integrated community musculoskeletal (MSK) physiotherapy services. This technology already helps treat over 330,000 NHS patients per annum across 22 CCGs and over businesses, but Fletcher realised soon after joining Connect Health last year that there was untapped potential to do much more.
Staff were spending much of their time on manual operational tasks such as migrating data that Fletcher was convinced could be automated.
He chose to deploy Thoughtonomy’s Intelligent Automation cloud platform to automate these high volumes, low value, repetitive tasks by replacing human labour with “virtual workers”. The initial use case was registering patients onto clinical systems, a time-consuming chore given that Connect Health receives over 1,000 patient referrals a day, which have to be registered within 48 hours of receipt.
The Thoughtonomy platform has allowed them to do twice as many registrations a day by automatically completing the process overnight, giving patients faster access to MSK care and freeing up staff to do more valuable work.
Fletcher gained staff support for the system by speaking to colleagues about the tasks they believed could be automated and always emphasising the potential to save time rather than the return on investment or raising revenues. He also reduced concerns about the technology itself by discussing it in language that humanised the deployment.
Find out more about Connect Health’s Automation Programme here
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