Singapore General Hospital, Singapore’s premier hospital, has been exploring robotic process automation since a core team for the effort was established in 2019.
Since then, 36 RPA use cases have been successfully deployed, saving 52,500 man hours and achieving over $1.8 million in productivity, the hospital said in a statement.
One of the most recent use cases is RPA for the collection of patient-reported outcome measures at the SGH Department of Physiotherapy – the first such use case in Singapore. After testing from March to December last year, the technology was able to save physiotherapists about 1,350 hours of manual computation and documentation.
The Department of Physiotherapy, which receives nearly 1,400 patients with musculoskeletal problems, is working to roll out PROMs offered by RPA in other local languages later this year to increase response rates up to 50% from current 25%.
Meanwhile, SGH plans to expand the use of RPA in the PROM collection to other clinical specialties.
TREND TO BIGGER WOMAN
SGH launched the first RPA use case in contact center operations in 2020. Since then, SGH has explored the use of RPA in extracting and processing information from online forms. for the Drug Delivery Service, as well as automatically bill patients for lab tests at Outpatient Specialist Clinics.
In another recent application of AI at SGH, a prediction engine called CARES-ML (Combined Risk Assessment in Surgery-Machine Learning) has been officially implemented to conveniently check the health status of patients for surgery.
SGH has also recently harnessed VR technology to train nurses. In partnership with Serious Games Asia and sensor solution developer Microtube Technologies, the hospital has developed a gamified role-playing training module called IV NIMBLE (Nursing Innovation in Mobility-Based Learning) to train nurses in IV catheterization.
ON PROFILE
“While [RPA] enhancing our process back-end, it could also benefit our patients depending on the use case. [SGH] will continue to look at broader adoption of RPA to take on repetitive manual tasks and enhance clinical workflows. That way, employees can focus on more complex work that requires thought processes,” said Chan Wai Ching, assistant director of the Automation and Artificial Intelligence Unit and RPA leader at SGH. know.
