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Deploying RPA in the HSE Ciarán Galway speaks with Kevin Kelly, RPA Lead with HSE Shared Services and Philip McGrath, Public Service Innovation Policy Lead with the Reform and Innovation Division at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (DPER) about the rollout of robotic process automation (RPA) across the Health Service Executive (HSE).
What are the key drivers of RPA deployment in the HSE? Philip McGrath The key drivers of RPA in the HSE are the same as the drivers of RPA in any of our public service bodies; we need to automate processes that are time consuming and laborious to make organisations more efficient. These processes follow a particular pattern; they generally involve several different systems, and they involve rules. RPA frees up staff to be transferred to do more value-added work and undertake more cerebral tasks, while simultaneously speeding up processes. Moreover, RPA assists in performing a type of audit on an organisation’s processes. It helps to identify areas where processes really aren’t contributing to desired outcomes, other processes that lean methodology can be applied to, as well as processes that might not need to be undertaken at all. This improves the service delivered to citizens, making it better, easier to use and quicker.
Kevin Kelly In many of the areas where we have deployed RPA, it has enabled those
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already stretched teams to absorb more work with the same headcount. Although traditionally a good fit in the areas of administration and particularly within HR and finance, we are observing interest from both administrative and frontline areas and through the conversations we are having right across the health sector, use cases are emerging that positively impact frontline services directly. For instance, nurses who have been relieved of administrative tasks through RPA and surveillance scientists who have handed over their administrative tasks to a robot or virtual worker, thereby allowing them to analyse infectious disease data rather than having to process it first.
delivery model we have subsequently adopted have been validated by DPER. This instilled a high degree of confidence that our approach is correctly aligned with broader public sector policy.
Philip McGrath
Kevin Kelly
DPER has been involved in research, testing, piloting, and growing RPA since the end of 2016. Our collaboration with the HSE has confirmed that RPA can be gamechanger in terms of how we administer our services to the citizen. The health sector is the largest and, arguably, the most complex component of the public sector and we know that there are several systems that would be prohibitively expensive and difficult to integrate using conventional automation methods. That’s why driving RPA’s success in this particular sector will pave the way for other centres of excellence to embed RPA across government.
Having DPER’s stamp of approval on this technology and on the approach that we were taking has been invaluable. From the HSE’s perspective, DPER came on board at an early opportunity and supported us to identify suitable areas to conduct a number of pilots. Since then, the decisions we have taken to invest in the establishment of our Centre of Excellence and in the operating and
While we have centres of excellence in Revenue, the National Shared Services Office and the Department of Social Protection is working through its options at the moment, what the HSE has done is showcase how RPA can be successful in terms of changing how we do work. This ranges from the back office and the work done in relation to Garda vetting to the Mater Hospital, where nurses have been
What are the advantages of the HSE/DPER collaboration on RPA?
