The Hutt Valley District Health Board (HVDHB) in New Zealand provides healthcare services to more than 100,000 residents. In the coming years, the Hutt Valley demographic is expected to change dramatically — population growth is declining, and residents are aging. Since HVDHB anticipates an increase in patients with long-term health needs, they wanted to quickly develop solutions that would improve patient experience and quality of care, and offload manual tasks from staff. To do this, they brought in a team of SS&C Blue Prism digital workers with help from Quanton.

Challenge

Like many health care providers, HVDHB is experiencing increasing demands to provide higher levels of clinical and administrative support while contending with resource-constrained staff. They aimed to reduce the manual effort for employees completing repetitive, unsatisfying tasks.

One area that generated a large amount of manual effort was the critical e-referrals processes. When a general practitioner refers a patient to a specialist, they create an e-referral in a Patient Management System. Clinical administrators must then collect the e-referrals and manually complete registration for each in two key HVDHB systems (Concerto and WebPAS). To make matters more complicated, the manual process requires 37 separate steps, so administrators spend an average of 7.5 minutes to complete one e-referral registration.

Once registered, the administrator then accesses WebPAS to complete the e-referral and to generate and send a letter to the patient and specialist. Admins spend an additional five minutes to complete this part of the process. Since the team receives roughly 18,000 e-referrals each year, HVDHB needed a new solution to free its skilled workforce from data entry and allow them to participate in more engaging and customer-facing tasks.

Solution

HVDHB turned to their partner Quanton, a leading digital transformation and RPA provider in ANZ, to deploy an SS&C Blue Prism digital workforce and to manage e-referral registrations. Digital workers now collect e-referrals from specialist service queues in Concerto and complete each registration. At 6:00 pm each day, digital workers open the target systems, search for unregistered e-referrals, complete validation checks, update demographic data and create the e-referral record. If digital workers encounter incomplete or incorrect information, the e-referral is passed to a skilled staff member for further investigation. Once an e-referral has been properly registered, a digital worker closes the loop and generates a referral letter for the specialist and the patient.

To date, digital workers have returned more than 36,639 hours to employees who can now focus on activities that enhance patient care and clinical outcomes. Quality and accuracy have increased — 100% of e-referrals are free of human error and compliant with regulatory and process requirements. Even better, advanced analytics and newly available data have increased organizational transparency, reporting and governance.

Based on the successful automation of HVDHB’s e-referrals process, Quanton deployed digital workers to automate e-referrals at four additional district health boards in New Zealand. They continue to explore options to scale intelligent automation in the DHBs.