Event / The rise of the ‘Bots’ and the automation of administrative tasks

In 2021, NHS Lothian achieved the accreditation as a Centre of Excellence from NICE in Robotic Process Automation (RPA). The small team in Lothian has been working on the development and deployment of ‘Bots’ that can undertake simple and repetitive administrative tasks. These Bots free up human resource to focus on more value adding activities and allow the organisation to undertake tasks that have not been done previously due to resource constraints.

In this webinar, Paul Schofield, Head of Digital Innovation at NHS Lothian:

• provides a brief overview explaining what RPA is
• shares the journey NHS Lothian has been on and the projects that have been developed and delivered to date
• covers other types of automation that his team have developed using Microsoft’s Power Automate to show how there are simpler types of automation more readily available that can add value to a process.

In this webinar, delegates had a chance to look at the ‘Blue Peter Totalisers’ used to visually show the benefits being realised. These totalisers look at the number of steps undertaken by the Bots, the amount of time saved by the Bots doing a task instead of a human colleague and the number of patients processed by the Bots.

The aim was be to paint a realistic picture, to show the successes and challenges seen at NHS Lothian and to look to what the next steps are.