News - Allocate UK Healthroster and Power BI Robot Launched #COVID19
The Business Informatics and Finance Team at East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust have launched a series of graphical reports to help operationally manage the Covid-19 pandemic for the Trust.
The staff data that feeds the BI reports comes from Allocate UK's Healthroster. Unfortunately with no HL7, API or SQL backend, the only way to extract the data every hour was for a human to do it 24x7. With this approach completely impractical the challenge was given to the Trust's automation team to see if we could come up with a solution using robots.
The Healthroster system is cloud-based and accessible via a browser but relies upon outdated Adobe Flash. For automation, the only option was to use Surface Automation which increased the complication for us.
Thanks to the support from our friends at Blue Prism Cloud, we were able to develop a sample process that we have adapted to use to pull two sources of data from Healthroster. The performance of Healthroster via the cloud can be poor and virtually unusable at certain times of the day but somehow we have managed to implement a process that is working 95% of the time (enough to ensure we have a new data extract each hour!).
Here are two videos of the data extraction process running in real-time.... Person With A Skill and Assigned Duties by Person.
My sincere thanks to the Blue Prism Cloud Team - Matt Williams, Adam Greenwood, Aaron Diaz and Naomi Keen.