Located in Wales, the NHS Aneurin Bevan Health Board is responsible for providing a broad range of healthcare services for its 600,000 residents. As the COVID-19 pandemic continued into 2021, Aneurin Bevan faced new and unexpected challenges, one of which was keeping track of patients’ vaccination status. As patients arrived at the hospital, their unknown status made accurate risk assessment difficult. This NHS Health Board needed a reliable way to assess their patients records accurately. And they found one with a Blue Prism digital workforce.

Challenge

Providing quality healthcare during a pandemic has been an acute challenge for healthcare providers globally, and Aneurin Bevan was no exception. But as the COVID-19 situation continues to evolve, so do the nature of the problems that NHS Health Boards need to solve. One new issue that Aneurin Bevan now faced was determining if a patient arriving at one of their facilities had been vaccinated. While some patients might have a digital certificate to prove their status, others did not. And none of this information was connected to Aneurin Bevan’s systems, so the frontline staff couldn’t be sure. It was a situation that elongated the patient triage process, causing healthcare staff to struggle to properly assess a patient’s risk on arrival.

Data about people’s vaccination status was available within a central data warehouse, but that data didn’t pass through into their Health Board Clinical Portal, meaning front line staff had no easy way of validating patients’ vaccine status. And with over a million records to upload at an estimated two minutes per record, it was impractical for human workers to even attempt the data migration process, so it wasn’t being done at all.

Solution

Entering one million vaccination records into Aneurin Bevan’s systems manually was impossible for staff due to other responsibilities; fortunately, the task was perfectly suited to a Blue Prism digital workforce. A team of eight digital workers were rapidly deployed and got to work pulling patient information from the PAS, creating a document with a patient’s vaccination details, and uploading that document to the patient record within the Health Board Clinical Portal.

The digital workers are fast; each can upload an average of one record every 28 seconds instead of one record every 2 minutes. In eight weeks, they had cleared the backlog and uploaded over one million vaccination records. Most importantly, now when patients arrive at any of Aneurin Bevan’s facilities, frontline staff have immediate access to their up-to-date vaccination status, which makes managing the risks of COVID-19 safer and more efficient.