Digital automation improves health care processes, which saves time and money
COVID-19 pandemic put a lot of added pressure on the Finnish healthcare system. Staffing shortages in healthcare are a serious issue, and on top of it, those who are working have to spend too much time on things other than the care itself.
The wellbeing services county of Päijät-Häme wanted to find ways to alleviate this pressure on their staff. Additionally, they wanted to improve customer experience and lower operating costs. Process optimisation with the new Automation Centre of Excellence (CoE) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) were the first steps. The collaboration with Vuono Group was very fruitful, as it opened even more ways to automate processes in the future.
“We highly value the holistic approach in automation, which Vuono Group introduced us to. It is not just about RPA, but how to improve the automation rate of our end-to-end processes as a whole. This is a very different mindset from most consultancies and it helped us to get the journey started."
– Jari Siitonen, Product manager
Collaboration in brief
Setting up the Automation Centre of Excellence (CoE)
Creating a model for introducing, prioritising and implementing process development ideas
Identifying solution alternatives from process change to system integration, RPA, micro service or application development
Successfully piloting new ways of working with a real-life use case
Our approach
Collaboration kicked off with current state analysis. Our team of experts dug deep to find out how automations are managed and what types of development opportunities there are with automation technologies and operating models.
We also clarified the existing vision for CoE into tangible future state statements. Those addressed CoE steering and planning, development process and technology development in a very concrete manner.
Next, we set up the CoE. All the necessary policies, tools and documentation (e.g. development, testing and maintenance instructions) were also provided in this phase.
Finally, we tested the CoE, operative model and new ways of working in a pilot project. We streamlined the work in hospital wards and the recovery room with RPA.
Impact: scalable model for future digital automation
The goal of setting up CoE was to scale up the RPA usage and build a strong foundation for wider automation. This was achieved and as a result, future plans for automation are starting to take shape. For example, automated process identification and process orchestration on a larger scale are on the table.
The impact:
The pilot project proved that developing automation from an idea to production is more simple and straightforward than before.
Identifying additional ways to develop care professionals’ demanding work – process improvements and ideas for system updates, to name a few.
Automation helps to eliminate mistakes, which improves employee and customer experience.
Streamlining the processes of care increases patient safety and decreases the time to be admitted to care.
CoE brings cost savings through better use of time and resources. Meaning less time is wasted on other things than the care itself.
"The end result of our collaboration with Vuono Group hits the initial targets perfectly. We are very satisfied with their work.”
– Johanna Järvelä, ICT-specialist & Service Designer
About the collaboration
The wellbeing services county of Päijät-Häme is responsible for organising public healthcare, social welfare and rescue services within its own area.
Building successful automations at this scale requires collaboration between a number of different interest groups. This collaboration was a joint effort between the Päijät-Häme team, their partners and digital automation experts from Vuono Group, Futurice and Swanlake Strategy.