My Automation Week #4
Updated: Jan 11, 2020
I am writing this blog entry 38,000ft in the air with just 45mins until I land in Bangkok but despite being the start of my long-overdue holiday this week has been yet another incredible week.
My automation team started a new way of working this week by introducing two-week sprint cycles for development. It is hoped that it will allow us to improve our speed of delivery yet ensure all team members are fully aware of what everyone is working on. It will also set a sense of focus and urgency to our work, which is the way my team love to work.
Our first two-week cycle will see the completion of two new processes, process deep dives for four new initiatives as well as tweaks to an existing process to improve resiliency.
A follow-up session with our cancer team has finalised the first two processes to be developed.
GP Referrals into Kainos Evolve – Two-week wait (2WW) referrals arrive via NHS mail and ERS. So much time is spent processing these referrals, printing them and uploading into our EPR. It is hoped we can repurpose a lot of the bot code already developed for our Urgent Treatment Centre and non-cancer GP referrals.
MDT Outcomes to GPs – Once an MDT session has been finalised and all patient outcomes clinically documented, it is a very manual process to send summaries to the patient’s GP. A member of cancer hub needs to spend all day downloading clinical information from Somerset and manually emailing GPs.
A follow-up session with our HR team identified seven processes for non-medical staff on-boarding. The time-saving opportunities across all these processes are massive. The processes will be prioritised, and work will start on developing our first. This opportunity will allow us to build objects for TRAC, NHS Jobs and enhance our existing ones for ESR. I am sure a lot of this work will be beneficial to other NHS Trusts via our marketplace.
On Tuesday, I had the pleasure of visiting the fabulous Paul Wyman and his exec colleagues at Dorset CCG and ICS. I had the opportunity to share my journey, my future developments, demo the bots in action and answer questions from the enthusiastic and excitable team. Paul totally understands the benefits of collaboration across the NHS, and I hope to welcome him to our incredible club in the coming months. The 5-hour train ride there and back wasn’t as exciting.
On Wednesday, I presented an update to our e-health board about my successes, and after I return from Asia, we will look at expanding the development team in Colchester so we can deliver more processes. My output is limited to the team I have.
And finally, I am delighted to announce that my whole team, Lorna Fairbrother, Ian Mitchell, Isobel George, Neale Munson and myself are now all qualified Thoughtonomy Developer Practitioners!
We are just starting our descent into the Land of Smiles.
Have a good weekend.