We are also looking at a digital doctors ’ bag which we will give to the care homes we support so that the staff there can actively monitor patients ’ stats with an array of Bluetooth devices . This will allow our travelling nursing staff and the local GPs to remotely view the patient ’ s data and actively support these elderly people more closely . ” Crean explains .
The Robotic Process Automation ( RPA ) journey Crean explains that the Trust is currently embarking on an RPA journey . There are countless areas where our staff spend their time doing repetitive simple tasks that could easily be automated . They are assessing a few potential solutions and working with various parts of the organisation where the Digital team thinks there are the greatest opportunities for the technology to make a positive impact . He believes that they should start with corporate services such as HR and finance , where there are some repetitive tasks such as working in spreadsheets , which can then , if automated , help save time for work in clinical departments . But he added that the Trust was still learning .
“ At the moment we are working out the projects we want to start with , and we have an RPA team on it looking at piloting some , but so far we are learning from other parts of the NHS itself that are further down the RPA road . However , we are very keen to get a baseline and evaluate how the technology can demonstrate the benefits and we can see other Trusts have saved many 1000s of hours , reduced costs , increased time with patients and lifted staff away from those bits of drudgery in their jobs .,” he says .
Working in partnership with As with the nature of an NHS Trust and the variety of services and locations involved with it as mentioned , there are obviously many different types of partners , however ,
Crean says the technical suppliers are obviously a big part of the Trust ’ s operations .
For electronic patient records , the Trust uses TPP , which is a global provider of healthcare technology which also works alongside governments to improve health outcomes , tackle inequalities in care , reduce costs and improve the experience for both patients and clinicians .
Along with this , Vodafone is the Trust ’ s major telephony supplier . Crean says : “ With an organisation as remote and distributed as ours , Vodafone ’ s support works very well in keeping everybody connected to our systems .”
104 December 2021