Imagine having to manually check for and key in administrative details of GP clinics and each of their doctors every month. Then imagine the same task repeated separately across the 7 or 8 institutions in SingHealth. 

This had become part of routine work for the hospitals or national centres when a national initiative was rolled out to enable GP clinics to directly book appointments for their patients to see specialists in all the 3 healthcare clusters in Singapore. Each month, the government agency in charge of the national Health Appointment System, would send out a monthly list of interested clinics and doctors to each institution to enter into their patient management system.

To save time and manpower cost, as well as take the tedium out of the repetitive work, Hsu Wenkai and his team at the Singapore General Hospital’s Division of Population Health & Integrated Care (PHIC), turned to Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

Wenkai says, “The bot has allowed the team to increase our productivity as this time-consuming task is ‘outsourced’ to the bot.”

There is significant time savings as compared to the manual process given the numerous fields that need to be updated on the system. With RPA, the potential errors when data entry is done manually is also eliminated.

“These bots are faster, way more consistent than us, and they don't need to get up and stretch nor take a coffee break (allowing us to stretch and have a break instead). Isn't that great,” says Wenkai.  And he has a report card to show for it too: 

 

 

Robotic Process Automation or RPA is an automation software that can be programmed to perform high-volume, tedious and repetitive tasks on its own by interacting with different systems and applications.  Just like us, these bots can: 

• See what’s on a screen, type on the keyboard, navigate systems, identify and extract data, and 

• Perform a wide range of actions defined by us.  

Thinking of using RPA to automate some of your work processes but are not sure how to get started?

 

Connect with the existing Citizen Developer (SGH infopedia access required) in your division if there's one, or if you love to get hands-on and dive into RPA coding yourself, check out our introduction to UiPath programming. (SGH infopedia access required)

 

If not, get in touch with Wai Ching, our SGH RPA lead with the Artificial Intelligence & Automation team under the Department of Future Health System, at [email protected] today!