My Automation Week #3
Updated: Jan 11, 2020
With a week to go until I fly off to Asia for three weeks, it has been all a bit manic trying to leave everything in a good place before I depart.
Started the week with an excellent session with my team reviewing our working practices and formalising our approach to managing our development lifecycle. Before the launch of our Urgent Treatment Centre, the team were assigned individual development projects but having multiple developers focus on a single deliverable has brought benefits. From December, the in-house team will move to a commercial business type model that will see us engage differently with our customers. This will allow us to dynamically expand the team and consider taking on development work for the regionally integrated care system (ICS).
This week saw two fascinating internal engagement sessions to scope out a series of automation for Human Resources (HR) and our Cancer Team.
For HR, we are defining a whole programme of work around the recruitment process that will save time for the team. I am hoping this opportunity will allow me to go beyond RPA and using Thoughtonomy's cognitive tools to add a layer of efficiency. For example, using bots to rank job applications based on the job description and analysing candidate references.
Our Cancer Team continues to be under pressure. Creating a multi-layered strategy that addresses the immediate administrative burden of processing incoming referrals and registering the patient on both PAS and Cancer systems will save hundreds of hours and reduce the burden and stress levels on our staff. In parallel, we will start solution design for ensuring clinicians book diagnostics test and receive results most efficiently. I am also scoping out the potential of collaborating with a 3rd party AI supplier to deliver decision support for identifying optimal treatment pathways for our cancer patients. This is where intelligent automation can make a difference.
A visit to our friends at Kent & Canterbury NHS Trust to share our successes and explore the benefits of collaborating with 15+ Trusts across the UK was enjoyable.
The only way the NHS will scale RPA+ is through collaboration, the sharing and repurposing of existing solutions and the alignment of development priorities. Through this method of working I can envision 10 to 15 new processes being available via the NHS Marketplace for FREE each month.
A few conversations this week with non-NHS public sector organisations has given me something to think about.
And to end the week I had my annual appraisal, luckily I have done well enough not to be fired.
Have a great weekend, everyone.