The Time is Right for NHS to Accelerate Healthcare Process Automation

With its exceptional track record of providing first-rate medical support to over 28 million citizens, Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) is globally recognised as a pioneering example of what publicly funded healthcare can achieve.

However, the stresses and strains of running a monolithic system are also well documented. Among its many challenges is modernising systems and processes to simplify back-office functions used by over 1.6 million employees.  Healthcare Process Automation has become an urgent necessity rather than a ‘nice to have’.

When the UK Department of Health and Social Care identified the digital transformation of the NHS as a ‘top priority’ in 2023, it echoed FlowForma’s view that this is an organisation that could reap huge rewards from Healthcare Process Automation. It’s also a healthcare institution that we are very familiar with, having worked with UK hospitals for nearly a decade.

No Red Tape to NHS Process Automation

In 2022 FlowForma was recognised as an approved vendor on N365, the shared tenancy the NHS uses to host Microsoft 365, and we have been adopted by several of the Trusts that manage healthcare services across Britain. We have real-world examples of introducing digital workflows into healthcare settings, from health and safety incident reporting to hospital transfer processes. 

Every IT vendor will tell you they can always do more for their customers, but in our case, we think there’s a compelling case to make for much greater adoption of Healthcare Process Automation in the NHS.

Bypassing Barriers to Transformation

Slowing down progress is a reluctance among some Trusts to do more with automated workflows, based on preconceived notions that no longer apply to digital transformation. They date back to a first foray into digital transformation, between 2002 and 2011, when, according to the UK’s National Audit Office, there was an “expensive and largely unsuccessful” attempt to improve digital technology services in the NHS.  

In July 2019, a new strategy was introduced that allowed Trusts more autonomy in their approach, as long as they complied with national standards. Mindful of past failures, a report followed in 2020 that warned of barriers to success, including concerns about a lack of interoperability between local systems, a lack of digital leadership, and shortages of digital skills in the wider NHS workforce.  

A follow-on document, Digital Transformation in the NHS, published in June 2023, repeated the same concerns as the 2020 report. Three years of the same perceived barriers to digitalisation risk being embedded in the way NHS decision-makers think about NHS digital transformation.

The market reality is very different. Interoperability and a lack of digital skills in Healthcare Process Automation are among the problems we set out to solve when we launched FlowForma.  

Democratising Healthcare Digital Transformation

Not just FlowForma but the whole ‘no-code’ software revolution, has gathered pace in the last five years, precisely because it addresses the issues the National Audit Office is concerned about.

No-code is about alleviating a dependency on technical skills, specifically software development, where projects are often delayed because of time constraints on overworked developers who write the code.

Not just a resourcing issue, there is also the risk of project goals getting ‘lost in translation’ when a business problem is not understood by the technical people charged with fixing it.  

FlowForma uses simple steps and drop-down menus to create digital workflows, enabling anybody with modest experience in using computers to digitalise and automate complex processes.

The point is that it doesn’t require the digital skills that the NHS fears are absent from the workforce, it negates the need to have them in the first place supporting the case for accelerated healthcare process improvement.

Interoperability is another defining principle of what we do. Our workflow automation tool is built in the cloud, with open APIs that enable secure integration with just about any kind of software – ERP, CRM, etc., even geolocation and photo-sharing applications.

Essentially, we provide an overlay that allows the new workflow to run both independently and alongside other digital technology solutions. This means you can digitalise a process without having to replace or upgrade the entire IT stack.

Taking Process Change From the Cloud  

Our approach to Healthcare digital transformation also addresses another well-documented problem, the failure of large-scale, ‘big bang’ IT projects to digitalise process change. Poor leadership, underestimating the importance of culture change, and choosing the wrong digital technology for the task, have all contributed to expensive projects hitting the headlines for all the wrong reasons. 

Like many large organisations with a long history, the NHS runs on legacy systems, backroom servers, and proprietary software. None of this is easy to swap out or upgrade, especially if they are used to run critical services. At the same time, maintaining them is a drain on IT departments who are constantly firefighting to keep the lights on.

This brings us to another misconception about digitalisation. Some IT departments are wary of third-party digital tools for healthcare process automation because they think they will add to their workload; that they’ll be asked to maintain old systems while introducing modern digital services alongside them. This is not the case with FlowForma because we provide Digital Process Automation (DPA) as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution.

SaaS is where the application is hosted in the cloud by the vendor, accessed by users through a browser, and paid for on subscription as an operational cost. No capital expenditure on hardware is required, just a decent internet connection. The IT department doesn’t have to worry about software updates or security patching – we take care of it, making upgrades in the background with no interruption to the service.

The role of the IT department is still important, providing governance and ensuring alignment with the wider IT strategy, but there are fewer demands on their time compared to traditional IT services. It allows them to focus on more critical, patient-facing services. In the long term, this helps to accelerate digital maturity and the NHS long-term plan.

As well as being simple to run and always up to date, FlowForma ticks another important box for overstretched IT resources – it’s secure. As part of the procurement process, we have been thoroughly vetted by numerous bodies, including NHS Trusts, and always pass the tests.

Changing Health and Care Professionals' Culture Incrementally

There is another big win for the NHS because FlowForma gets to the heart of the culture change problem that frequently undermines transformation projects. Nothing is lost in translation because the people involved in healthcare process automation are the employees who use the processes and know better than anyone the problems that need to be solved.   

It’s a ground-up approach to digital transformation, empowering users to define their processes. This also addresses the National Audit Office’s concerns about a lack of digital leadership. Digitalisation is democratised because everyone becomes a leader in their domain with FlowForma. 

Change becomes incremental, lowering the stakes in the unlikely event of a new process not delivering what was expected while opening the doors to doing more of the same if it does. We call this the Wildflower Effect. When one department extends its workflow into another department, that department sees the benefits and wants to try it for themselves.  

This is a long way from top-down IT projects that struggle to bring employees along on the journey, which is when the leadership deficit the National Audit Office warns about is a real issue. #

Both ground-up and top-down initiatives need champions across the organisation, evangelists for the technology that persuades others to adopt it. The advantage of the FlowForma ground-up approach is that change, and improvement, are enabled by the people who own (and control) the processes, so the number of champions will flourish. 

It's also worth noting that the people who procure no code solutions are often the people who learn to build the first workflows. One of our strengths is the broad appeal of our product to every type of executive and manager. Among those that have made the first move in signing up to a subscription are CFOs, CTOs, Heads of Digital as well as IT Managers. In the NHS, we also see a lot of interest from teams responsible for efficiency gains.

To learn more about this: 

Watch the FlowForma session at 'Transform NHS Estates with Digital Process Automation' where product strategist Paul Stone covers:

• The challenges NHS Estates encounter and how Digital Process Automation can help
• NHS Estates Use Cases for Process Automation
• Case Study: Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
• Process Automation for Facilities Maintenance
• Case Study & Demo: Blackrock Clinic – Workflow Automation for Fire Safety Checks - Q&A

Benefits of Healthcare Digital Transformation

FlowForma is an intuitive tool to master, made even simpler by our SureStart onboarding programme, where the first process that people learn to build almost always ends up going live. The return on investment begins immediately.

We know this is important to the NHS, which is under enormous cost constraints, and it’s why we tailor license agreements to grow with a Trust’s needs. This is very different from the variable-cost approach of a product like Power Automate, where complex subscription pricing can quickly exceed allocated budgets.

FlowForma also aligns with the Lean methodology that the NHS has embraced, which is about improving processes and performance while reducing costs and unnecessary waste. This gets to the heart of what FlowForma DPA delivers for our clients. The pain points we cure will be very familiar to NHS administrators, excessive paperwork, and an overdependency on Word and Excel documents exchanged over email, where it only takes one person to forget to reply for a process to hit a bottleneck.

NHS Trusts are typically made up of highly distributed departments running multiple processes, so it’s easy to see how mistakes are made or why patient delays occur. Digitalising processes in an end-to-end workflow is a game-changer, providing an auditable record of every touchpoint and accelerating the time it takes to complete a task.

FlowForma is used by the NHS for Incident Reporting, Hospital Transfers, Clinical Safety Checks, and many types of Procurement. As easy as building processes in the first place is adapting them to meet changing requirements. We know this is important for many Trusts because hospitals in the same Trust may have different ways of doing things, which makes it hard to implement a one-stop new technology solution that works for everyone.

A procurement team’s process in one hospital, for example, could have a very different sign-off procedure to another’s. The FlowForma platform is designed to be flexible as well as intuitive to use, which means administrators can tweak it to suit their process. A Trust can create a template and then pass it on to different hospitals who will make it a better fit for their needs. We like to think it’s a compelling combination of scale and flexibility.

Some Considerations When Selecting a Tool for Widespread Digital Transformation

There are two types of tools, No-code vs Low-code:

• No-code is faster (up to five times faster) as evidenced by our customers who have tried both options (FlowForma and MS PowerApps / PowerAutomate).

• No-code is designed to guide non-technical users to build digital solutions without depending on IT resources. Less time is spent learning the tool and more time spent on delivering results.

• Low-code… needs some coding! Unless you have some trained coders in your team, coding takes time to learn and coded solutions take longer to test and fix.

Select a tool designed for business process automation:

• Dedicated process tools allow you to manage human resources, collect data on tasks and report progress individually and across the entire business.

• Many no-code/low-code tools are for building applications not automating business processes.

• Process tools are designed to improve enterprise productivity (making business processes run more efficiently by automating communications etc.) e.g. processing a procurement request through approval and ultimately payment to the supplier. Application building tools are aligned to improving personal or individual productivity e.g. maintaining an appointment calendar.

Understand Digital Process Automation (DPA) vs Robotic Process Automation (RPA):

• Digital Process Automation (e.g. FlowForma) allows you to add automation to human processes. Collecting data to evidence jobs were done. Issuing communications through various channels to co-ordinate work. Tracking progress, collating statistics etc. DPA systems are designed to work with people, managing the many inconsistencies of the real world and applying consistent and efficient practices across the Trust, extending to external parties where necessary.

• Robotic Process Automation (e.g. UiPath) is focused on removing tedious, repetitive tasks from people by using robot workers to execute simple tasks. For example, transferring a treatment record from one system to another by mimicking the keying of the data that would normally require a person.

Both tools have their place. Each system can introduce efficiencies in different ways. They can also work well together, where DPA manages human tasks and communications and passes data to RPA for processing into a system.

And finally...

Finally, FlowForma opens the door to grassroots innovation, something that is difficult to achieve in private companies, let alone public sector organisations. We frequently see teams that have embraced our tool, like Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, begin to flex their workflow-building muscles, creating new digitalised processes where there was nothing before. It’s starting to unlock new efficiencies, like tracking repairs to get broken equipment back into wards more quickly or fast-tracking the onboarding of contract employees to address staff shortages.

Ultimately the way care professionals communicate, back office systems operate, and administrative tasks are executed is much more streamlined and cost effective. The beneficiaries are widespread. It's not just IT departments, HR and Finance personnel. Digital Process Automation technology solutions significantly impact how the NHS operates as a whole. Doctors are relieved of the administrative burden which in turn contributes positively to patient care.

As one of our customers observed, the only limit to what FlowForma can do is your imagination.

If you are interested in understanding more about the positive outcomes associated with Healthcare Process Automation in your hospital or healthcare environment please schedule a no-obligation demo or request a free trial.