Connect Health Spearheads Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Enhance Patient Care With Thoughtonomy
LONDON, Sept. 24, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Connect Health, the largest, independent provider of integrated community MSK (musculoskeletal) services in the UK, continues its significant investment into transforming patient pathways, by subscribing to the Thoughtonomy Intelligent Automation platform, a leading intelligent, cloud-based automation system.
As the company continues to experience rapid growth, it is seeing the complexity of care increase. In order to sustain performance, meet demand and continue to provide excellent patient care, it is working with the Thoughtonomy platform to enable certain high volume, low value, repetitive tasks to be automated and carried out by "virtual workers". This results in streamlined processes which free up time for colleagues to focus on the patient, rather than on certain administrative tasks.
The first phase of Connect Health's ground-breaking Intelligent Automation programme is the integration of "virtual workers" into some Referral Management Centre processes, namely the registration of patients onto clinical systems. Receiving over 1000 patient referrals each day, the company has a duty to register patients within 48 hours, so cutting this time will significantly speed up patient access to care.
This in turn will create capacity, allowing colleagues to grow and develop their individual skills to make a real difference to the patient journey. In addition it will enable the business to improve efficiency by providing better workforce planning, enhancing our ability to meet commissioner commitments, whilst providing further investment in training, coaching and job crafting. Finally, and most importantly, it will improve patient access to the best clinical care.
Graeme Fletcher, Chief Information Officer says "Innovation is at the core of everything we do, and I'm delighted that Connect Health is further investing resources into this ground-breaking AI journey. By using Thoughtonomy's Intelligent Automation platform, it provides us with the foundation to further improve the efficiency of our processes in order to deliver first class patient outcomes. With more than 330,000 patient referrals registered per year, leveraging leading edge AI technology helps us to scale our operations without sacrificing quality."
Donna Middleton, Director of Patient Experience added "We handle over 70,000 conversations a month with our patients and are focused on making every interaction count. Working with dedicated subject matter experts, we are confident that the introduction of "virtual workers" will allow colleagues to have more capacity to focus on the patient, in turn providing a better overall experience."
This is the first step in a comprehensive AI programme spanning many years and Connect is busy building its own in-house "automation" team.
Phil Sheen, Head of Public Sector and EMEA Sales at Thoughtonomy added "We've seen a real step change over the past six months in the appetite for automation and AI across the NHS and its eco-system of service providers. Healthcare leaders recognise that virtual workers complement the human skills and talents of their teams and create the opportunity to spend more time on direct clinical care with patients. Connect Health is at the forefront of this transformation and we are excited to be working with them."
About Connect
Connect Health is the largest, independent provider of integrated community MSK (musculoskeletal) services (including orthopaedics, pain and rheumatology) in the UK, serving over 330k NHS patients pa across 22 CCGs and 100+ businesses. Connect effectively and efficiently delivers care in a lower cost community setting, transforming services around specific quality and financial objectives and dramatically reducing waiting times and improving access to treatment. For more information please visit www.connecthealth.co.uk
About Thoughtonomy
Thoughtonomy, a Blue Prism company, delivers artificial intelligence (AI) driven intelligent automation platform that enables organizations and the people they employ to do more and achieve more. A leading provider of intelligent, cloud-based automation, the company's award-winning Software as a Service (SaaS) platform gives companies access to a pool of cloud based intelligent digital workers that can perform the repetitive, time-intensive tasks that slow people down. By integrating this digital workforce with their human teams, companies can accelerate growth and achieve a step change in efficiency. Thoughtonomy has grown at a rapid rate since being founded in 2013, with more than 200 customers using its platform in 29 countries spread across four continents. In 2019, Blue Prism acquired Thoughtonomy, to add the SaaS offering into its wider Connected-RPA portfolio. Visit www.thoughtonomy.com to learn more.
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