Podcast: How UiPath's Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is helping healthcare workers

In the face of increased demand and rapidly changing environments, notably the COVID-19 pandemic that has caused a global lockdown, businesses are turning to Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to ease operational burdens.

Healthcare institutions in particular are facing extreme challenges – from hospital backlogs to influx in demands to business continuity challenges.

RPA offers relief to overwhelmed organisations.

UiPath was recently recognised as the top company on The Deloitte Technology Fast 500 for 2019, a ranking of the fastest public and private technology companies in North America, and #3 on the 2019 Forbes Cloud 100.

It is also leading the fight for the healthcare industry against the effects of COVID-19.

Here to speak with us today about the rise of robotics and how the robotics industry is not only facilitating technological change, but is being used to help healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic is UiPath’s Managing Director and Vice President, Australia & New Zealand, Andrew Phillips.

UiPath is the world’s leading Robotic Process Automation company, to find out what that means listen to what Andrew has to say below.

How UiPath RPA is being used by healthcare

• Managing the high volume of testing requests:
  Automating the check-in process in the healthcare industry eliminates human error and allows digital paperwork to be processed quickly and accurately, ensuring faster service.
• Reducing wait time for testing requests: The demand for testing is exponential, and in some cases can lead to six-hour long lines. An attended robot can execute a testing transaction in 15 seconds, down from 2.5 minutes for a human, significantly reducing wait times.
• Filling orders for necessities faster: To meet the exponential increase in demand for certain items, one customer is now shipping directly from the manufacturing location to the customer. RPA robots process all orders and enter them into SAP to get the order to the manufacturing centre faster.
• Supporting the increased need in call centres: Agents supported by RPA are pulling customer data faster, ensuring a faster call triage process, faster routing to the appropriate agents, and reduced average call handling time.
• Preparing and enabling a remote workforce: Automating the process of registering new equipment for remote workers, as well as associating the equipment to the worker and creating new users for the VPN.

As an example, The Mater Hospital in Dublin is using UiPath’s attended robots to process COVID-19 testing kits in a fraction of the time. The hospital not only receives patients’ results in near real time, but significantly reduces the administrative strain placed upon its Infection Prevention and Control Department. By giving a robot to every nurse, the department saves three hours per day so medical personnel can spend more time taking care of patients rather than completing paperwork.

Furthermore, healthcare workers are spending hours on administrative work to properly add the new patient, record the patient data, and report it to the CDC. To aid with this entire process, one of the largest hospitals in the US quickly deployed a UiPath attended robot, and as a result, hospital backlogs have been reduced, eight to nine minutes per patient are saved, and costly manual errors have been eliminated.

Because hand sanitiser can play an important role in stopping the spread of COVID-19, a hygienic company has seen a 10x influx of orders. Their team in China usually processes the orders in SAP but could not keep up with the spike in demand – especially with some of the team not available to work due to quarantines. The team added 20 UiPath unattended robots to handle the volume and meet a growing market need.

An insurance company has experienced a huge volume increase due to the number of staff needs that needs to work virtually – specially in Remote Access Services (RAS), which is necessary in order to be able to work from home. The company created seven robots to support massive Service Now transactions, RAS, and Enterprise Mobility Services. Business continuity is now a reality as their teams can serve their customers remotely.