University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB) is the leading university teaching hospital in the West Midlands, UK. UHB is a highly innovative trust, constantly looking for ways to improve patient care and operational efficiency. When a patient has a significant change in their circumstances, their doctor informs the Personal Demographics Service (PDS). However, the PDS did not close the loop and share the information with relevant hospitals. This meant that, even though a patient may have died, UHB was still sending out appointment reminders and other communications. UHB had implemented the first patient self-administration kiosk in an NHS Trust hospital using Blue Prism. Encouraged by its success, UHB was now looking to drive even more efficiencies using intelligent automation.

Challenge

When a patient has a significant change in their circumstances, their doctor informs the Personal Demographics Service (PDS). However, the PDS did not close the loop and share the information with relevant hospitals. This meant that, even though a patient may have died, UHB was still sending out appointment reminders and other inappropriate communications. Understandably, this sort of error was very upsetting for grieving families. And UHB had about 50,000 deceased patient records that needed to be updated. With each record taking one minute to complete, UHB equated the time investment for this task to one person working fulltime for six months. In addition, there were an additional 5,000 records needing updates each quarter; a task that would take one full-time employee two weeks to complete.

Solution

Although this problem wasn’t unique to UHB, the Trust’s solution was an innovative one. Having enjoyed success with its self-service kiosk project, UHB saw an opportunity to tackle the problem with intelligent automation. To that end, they deployed
a Blue Prism intelligent digital workforce. The implementation time for the project was just three days. And within a few weeks, 50,000 records housed in UHB’s Patient Master Index (PMI) had been completely updated, effectively eliminating the chance of inadvertently contacting people who had passed away.

Read UHB’s story to learn how Blue Prism intelligent digital workers quickly updated 50,000 records improving the patient experience at UHB.