Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – or digital “workers” – have helped with automating claims processing, bills adjustment and the mass creation of patient profiles, saving a significant amount of manpower and time in Singapore's public healthcare system. We take a look at another recent example of how RPA has helped in the National University Health System’s (NUHS) dormitory operations.

NUHS began COVID-19 swab testing for foreign workers in the dormitories in early April 2020. In doing so, they have to register the foreign workers in the SAP system in order for the test results to be sent to the National Electronic Health Record (NEHR) for tracking and analysis purposes. For this to happen, a huge number of patient records needed to be created in the system. However, this presented a problem as the amount of administrative work from having to manually create these records was massive. Lily Loo, the NUHS’ RPA Project Director, explained:

“The dormitory operations were fast and furious, with hundreds to thousands of swab tests done daily. Just imagine – each patient record takes about two minutes to create, and there are thousands and thousands to create, requiring many hours of manual data entry and resulting in a backlog. It became necessary for us to find a more efficient way of doing this. Having experienced the ability of the RPA to automate processes that are highly repetitive and have low cognitive requirements in 2019, NUHS reached out to IHiS again to explore its use. Together, they worked round-the-clock from conceptualising the flow to the end-to-end solution in six days and went live on 17 April 2020.”

Wong Soo Min, NUHS Group Chief Financial Officer, elaborated:

“Given the urgency, we only had a short turnaround time to decide on a solution and implement it quickly. There was a lot of work put in to understand the mandatory fields, sieve out the demographic information, validate the identifiers, develop the bot, conduct the user acceptance tests, not counting how to fix the initial glitches during and after UAT. To add to the complexity, all the work was done through multi-party, multi-hour Zoom conference calls. It’s well worth the effort as this solution could be subsequently scaled across different institutions. It also speaks a lot about the rapport and trust level between the NUHS and IHIS teams – Kudos to the team!”

With the successful implementation of the RPA solution to automate the process of patient registration as well as case and visit creations, staff no longer have to spend much time on these tasks anymore. The overall efficiency is also increased as the robot needs only 30 seconds instead of two minutes to perform the tasks. As of 20 June, more than 72,000 patient records/visits have been created by the bot, translating to savings equivalent of 282 man-days.

For Mak Hau Kheong, Director, Product Management & Delivery Group 3-Backroom Operation Systems, IHiS, it was another example of how HealthTech has the ability to multiply efficiency and help the clusters in their fight against the virus. He said:

“Having worked closely together with NUHS on the RPA before, staff from IHiS’ Product Group, Development Centre and NUHS’ healthcare professionals have a high degree of synergy and trust among each other, with all parties understanding what was required to ensure a successful solution. We are glad to see how much time and manpower it has saved. Everyone worked long hours to develop it – but we are happy to do our part and will continue doing our best to help the healthcare staff get through this pandemic.”