About the Customer:
Heilbrigðisstofnun Norðurlands (HSN) is the largest national healthcare institution in Iceland that operates 18 clinics, 4 hospitals, and 3 nursing homes in the northern part of the country. Having the broadest regional coverage among other Icelandic healthcare institutions, HSN provides a full spectrum of healthcare services to over 35,000 patients, including general medical practice, infant and maternity care, school/home nursing, and psychological counseling.
Business Challenge
HSN is the most progressive healthcare institution in Iceland that constantly pursues new digital transformation initiatives to improve its efficiency, productivity, and patient experience. HSN had previously started its RPA journey and managed to automate a range of internal processes with a classical RPA solution. However, our client struggled with excessive licensing costs and a slow pace of RPA adoption. Hence, HSN had to put the project on hold to reconsider its business goals and requirements. After the re-assessment, the client formed a spectrum of key business challenges they had to tackle, namely:
- Find an experienced IT partner to help HSN facilitate their RPA adoption journey
- Identify and implement the best-case automation scenarios to enhance operational efficiency
- Optimize licensing and maintenance costs by selecting an alternative RPA tool
- Relieve employees from onerous manual work to increase their job satisfaction and productivity
- Enable precise data collection, processing, and management to improve patient experience
With renewed strategic objectives in mind, HSN began searching for a reliable IT service provider and eventually found Infopulse through the efforts of our mutual partner Imperio – an Icelandic IT sourcing company that provides tailored digital services in the Nordics.
After studying HSN’s business case, Imperio came up with an ambitious idea to develop a scalable and cost-efficient RPA solution based on Microsoft Power Automate. In addition to addressing the business challenges of HSN, the RPA solution could potentially be scaled across other regional institutions, thus driving the digital transformation of the entire Icelandic healthcare sector.
Solution
In collaboration with Imperio and Microsoft, Infopulse started developing a PoC of the RPA solution that involved the automation of numerous simple HR reporting processes. The RPA bot extracted the client’s HR reports from an Oracle database and checked the availability of various HR data, such as:
- Registered employee address, phone number, and e-mail
- Ownership of an access control card and its status (active/inactive)
- Employment status, including onboarding/offboarding dates
If any information was absent or incomplete, the RPA solution notified the respective employees to fill in the data. In the case when an employment contract had expired or was terminated, the RPA bot informed the administrators about the need to block the access card and remove the credentials of a former employee.
Being satisfied with the PoC results, HSN agreed to proceed with the development of a fully-fledged RPA solution. Imperio and HSN began analyzing the best options for process automation and managed to prioritize a backlog of to-be automated workflows. As of today, the RPA solution automates 20+ HR and financial processes, including report generation and verification, data entry, extraction, and migration across HSN’s systems, and patient data synchronization. Over 50 new HSN processes are now in the pipeline.
In addition to the ongoing process automation efforts, Infopulse developed a custom form recognition feature by utilizing AI Builder – a Microsoft Power Platform tool for creating AI models. Upon the creation of an entry, a PDF file with client data, such as tax identification number, address, family member’s data, and appointment history, is dropped into a shared network folder. The RPA solution automatically recognizes, extracts, processes, and transfers all of the patient data into the HSN’s dedicated database, and updates it in real-time.
What makes the RPA solution stand out is its exceptional scalability. In essence, the solution serves as a “marketplace” of automated workflows, which can potentially be deployed across Icelandic healthcare institutions en masse.
As the country’s entire healthcare sector has a similar IT infrastructure and processes, other regional institutions can access the “marketplace” and select certain workflows that were previously automated for HSN. In such a case, Infopulse will only have to adjust the automation scripts to the new institution by changing the usernames and other inputs. However, if another institution wants to automate a new custom process that is absent in the “marketplace”, Infopulse will have to develop it from scratch.
Technologies
Business Value
The ingenious RPA solution engineered by Infopulse has successfully addressed the full spectrum of HSN’s business challenges in terms of operational efficiency, cost savings, and patient experience. Most importantly, the inherent scalability of the solution promises to create identical value for other Icelandic healthcare institutions and their patients for years to come.
For now, the RPA solution brings the following benefits to HSN:
- Swift and error-free data entry, processing, and management that streamlines HR & financial operations
- Higher employee productivity and satisfaction, as they can focus on valuable tasks instead of tedious labor
- Consolidated and continuously updated patient data, which significantly improves patient experience
- Overall annual total cost (TC) expenses reduced by 10+ million Icelandic krónur (ISK) through 20+ automated processes and a more cost-efficient RPA licensing
Infopulse and Imperio plan to continue enhancing the solution for HSN and gradually onboard other regional Icelandic healthcare institutions to the project.
Þórhallur Harðarson
Svavar Vidarsson
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