Getting started with RPA

Identify the right capabilities

RPA programmes should align with organisational priorities which may differ between clinical and non-clinical teams. There are key questions that need to be considered to set up the right strategy and processes to deliver right outcomes.

Readiness to deliver

It's also important to identify and understand the key roles, skills and technology required to determine investment scope, and set up and deliver.

License types

Licensing for RPA can be complex as the nomenclature and pricing model can vary widely. The typical license types are described below:

When starting with RPA

Leverage the NHS’s current co-existing architecture

Once the priorities have been established and tooling and resourcing identified, there are multiple entry points to starting your RPA journey.

A hybrid approach encourages flexibility and provides the opportunity to adopt one, or multiple approaches, depending on your organisational needs and local priorities.

ICS Supported

• Regional approach
• Scalable
• Economies of scale
• Communities of practice 

RPA Hub Supported

• Building on lessons learned from colleagues across the healthcare ecosystem
• Working with existing NHS hubs

Commercial Partner Supported

• Working with vendors and advisory partners
• Technical expertise
• External SME and cross-sector insight

Note:

• ICS: integrated care system made up of multiple organisations providing care.
• RPA hub: referring to organisations that have mature RPA programmes and have been designated RPA hubs within the NHS network.

Consider the pros and cons of different models

Each option in the hybrid model has pros and cons to consider.

Hub supported approach

There are multiple examples of hubs and good practice in place across the health ecosystem that can provide guidance and advice to organisations planning and mobilising their own programmes. When designing and mobilising RPA programmes advice, guidance and support can be sought from these hubs to ensure knowledge transfer across the system.

Integrated care system (ICS) supported approach

The NHS Long Term Plan confirmed that all parts of England would be served by an integrated care system from July 2022. ICSs offer an opportunity to design solutions and invest at scale across regions. Working with ICS colleagues to define your RPA programmes provide opportunities for efficiency gains and benefits leveraging the scope of activities across the organisations.

Commercial partner supported approach: advisory partner

Several advisory support / consulting partners are a one-stop shop that can provide end-to-end services and expertise including infrastructure, design, development, run support and licenses. They are also adept at helping programmes understand what exactly they may need depending on their strategy, programme maturity and individual requirements.

Commercial partner supported approach: product vendor

Teams could also directly approach RPA vendor(s) to discuss a delivery strategy. This will allow them to jointly outline a plan that best fits the programme requirements, while addressing any specific programme constraints.

The RPA vendors can support internal staff to build RPA capability or help engage one of the external advisory partners based on the size, scale and maturity of the programme, and specific programme requirements.

After starting with RPA

Build a benefits case

RPA will drive reduction in operational costs and costs of care delivery. But to develop a comprehensive benefits case, organisations should look at all clinical and non-clinical outcomes.

Operational benefits include:

1. Increased operational capacity and speed.
2. Patient and treatment backlog reduction.
3. Reduced cost of care by reducing cost of delivery.
4. Faster turnaround.

Patient safety outcomes and experience include:

1. Improved patient journey and experience.
2. Better, faster and seamless delivery of care.
3. Increased time for care due to reduction in admin and manual activities.

Staff benefits include:

1. Improved staff engagement.
2. Improved staff experience by enabling them to focus on value-added activities.
3. Reduced attrition and burnout. Staff sickness or staff satisfaction.

Process efficiency benefits include:

1. Improve care quality and patient safety by reducing operational risk and variability.
2. Manual and transactional activities, and tasks get done quicker while also reducing human error.
3. Reduced process variability

Join the NHS National Community of Practice for RPA to access examples of Benefit Case, Benefit Framework and ROI.

How to build a benefits case

For a comprehensive benefits case, a ‘total cost of ownership’ view should be taken to ensure all cost and benefit aspects of the solution have been identified and accounted for.

Step 1. Conduct process performance analysis

Once a target use case has been identified, conduct as-is volumetric analysis to outline data, metrics and KPIs for the use case.

Step 2. Identify and outline benefits

Every team and organisation may have a different driver for RPA; identify all the benefits that RPA will enable for your organisation and use case.

Step 3. Quantify benefits

Quantify the benefits identified in step 2, using the data collected in step 1; account for cost of delivering and managing the automated solution.

Step 4. Validate

Once the benefits have been identified and quantified, validate the data, assumptions and final benefits case, both from an operational and financial perspective.

Step 5. Track and manage

Benefits case should be monitored and reviewed at the delivery stage to ensure that assumptions, metrics and KPIs are still applicable

Top tips

The benefits case should ideally be analysed, managed, reviewed and audited at an opportunity as well as the programme level. RPA creates a dependency between two or more systems which can lead to systems becoming embedded, making change harder, more expensive, and riskier, which in turn can lead to legacy systems remaining in place for extended periods of time.

RPA also reduces the benefits case for upgrading legacy apps. Organisations should review long-term IT roadmaps and create and risk assess short- and long-term benefits cases to ensure RPA is leveraged at the right time for the right use cases.

Transitioning from RPA programme delivery to RPA service

After the bots have gone live, they need to be managed like any other software solution. Hence, it is important to consider what an RPA service model will look like. The service wrapper needs to carefully consider business as usual requirements and business criticality. Fall back options and service level agreements (SLAs) should be planned by engaging the right business, clinical, frontline and/or support staff to ensure they are in line with how the bots will be used.

Engage an external partner

There are a variety of external partners that provide services to run and maintain RPA services of varying size and scale. These include traditional consulting firms, business process outsourcers, information technology services firms, niche RPA consulting firms as well as specialised companies that just run and manage bot farms.

Depending on the scale of their RPA programmes and vision for growth, teams can approach one or more partners to understand services provided and associated cost models.

Commission from third party within the NHS

There are several pockets of RPA service capability across the NHS, both at an organisation and regional levels, such as ICS. Their capabilities ranges from project teams following the principle, “If you develop it, you run it” to organisations that have procured fully managed services provided by an external partner.

Teams that are just starting their RPA journey could explore whether hubs or partners at a regional level can provide third party services to manage their bots, or if they can benefit from scale of those that have commissioned external providers.

Establish your own

Teams can look at expanding their internal capacity to account for roles and capabilities required to run and manage their RPA bots or digital workforce, and transition to a fully managed service like other IT applications or systems. The full range of service components that will need to be developed and delivered are outlined in section 4 under the ‘Release and Embed’ section, for reference.

This service will be outside of the scope of project delivery team once the hypercare* period has been completed – hence the teams should plan for this at the onset of development.

Note: *Hypercare is user-centred support during a critical period in the project lifecycle

Procuring RPA

To procure RPA software and services, organisations will first need to determine the procurement category pillar the requirements will fall under. All six pillars have been described below. Any product within these pillars must meet the minimum standards defined.