New RPA system delivers over 70% time saving
Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust includes three hospitals which provide acute services to over half a million residents across Wakefield and North Kirklees. It is therefore crucial that all staff have easy access to all essential training resources.
The Challenge
Registrations to the Trust’s Digital Learning System (DLS) were inherently labour intensive and time consuming, so the Trust wanted to find a way to automate the registration process to ensure their healthcare workers could have faster access to online learning.
Historically, the process involved multiple steps:
- A Digital Training Team member would log into the DLS to register each learner individually
- The generated registration ID for each learner was then recorded
- The learner was then enrolled into each required online course, one by one
- Registration confirmation and login details were then manually emailed to each learner upon completion
As such, each registration could take up to five minutes, so a full cohort of 200 registrations would take the whole team around one and a half days to complete. The process was also monotonous and repetitive, making it prone to errors and negative impacts on mental health for staff.
Additional challenges involved registrations often being received in large batches and could only be processed during working hours – and with many locum and agency requests falling out of hours and on weekends, many learners faced longer waits as requests backlogged until the team’s next working day.
The team is also responsible for the full delivery and facilitation of all training across the Trust. The original DLS registration process was so labour intensive, it was estimated that, within the time it would take to complete 200 registrations, each team member could have delivered three 90-minute training classes.
The Solution
Keen to find a more efficient DLS registration process, the Trust decided to automate a portion of its requests – alongside four other admin automation projects within the same 12-month pilot period. Using NDL’s RPA toolkit, it designed a streamlined approach that would first be applied to doctor DLS registrations on a testing basis, before it was then deployed for all other healthcare staff.
Under the new system – all registration requests are now populated into a database, where a bot then automatically creates a unique account for each learner with the required information. The process was then further improved during the pilot phase – based on the learner’s job title, the bot can now enroll learner’s onto only the relevant eLearning courses.
Successfully completed registrations trigger an automatic email to learners, providing them with account confirmations and login details. Where bots detect errors, such as duplicate learner accounts in the DLS, cases would be flagged to the Digital Learning Team for further investigation – reducing errors and failed registrations overall.
The Benefits
Since implementing the new automated process, the Digital Learning Team can now complete a full cohort of 200 DLS registrations within 90 minutes, as opposed to one and a half days.
During a test, a doctor’s account was enrolled from registration request onto four required eLearning courses. The bot completed the task and sent a confirmation email within 1 minute and 29 seconds – where the same process took an experienced administrator 5 minutes and 24 seconds, resulting in a time reduction of 72.5%.
Not only does this mean essential healthcare staff have quicker access to a number of important learning resources – but the process has also delivered a number of benefits to the Trust and its professionals:
- Significant reduction in resource and time demands, resulting in more capacity for training
- Elimination of repetitive, monotonous tasks
- Positive mental health and wellbeing impacts for the Digital Learning Team
- 24/7 processing for faster registration
- Quicker access for locum and agency workers
- Reduction in failed registrations and account errors
Belinda Self, Digital Training Team Leader for Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust comments: “During a time that our organisation and the whole NHS is under great pressure, this has made a great difference to team morale. Their wellbeing has benefitted as the manual creation of eLearning accounts is very laborious.”
Gareth Cinnamon, Digital Programme Manager, Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust concludes: “Not only is it a big timesaver for the team, and an improvement for their mental health as they don’t have to sit and do all of this manually – but it also provides them with more time to provide extra courses and training to staff. It just frees up a lot of time, it’s actually quite amazing.”
Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust has recently received an honourable mention at NDL’s Community awards in recognition of the success of their RPA project.
Public sector organisations and NHS Trusts across the country participated in the NDL Community Awards, which showcase a diverse range of innovative projects that demonstrate the best use of automation and digital solutions to overcome some of the biggest challenges being faced by public services today.
