Singapore General Hospital, Singapore's flagship hospital, has been exploring robotic process automation since a core team for this endeavour was formed back in 2019.

Since then, 36 RPA use cases have been successfully implemented, saving 52,500 man-hours and gaining over $1.8 million in productivity, the hospital said in a statement. 

A most recent use case is the RPA for patient-reported outcome measures collection at the SGH Physiotherapy Department – the first such use case in Singapore. Following a trial between March and December last year, the technology was able to save physiotherapists about 1,350 hours of manual calculations and documentation. 

The Physiotherapy Department, which sees nearly 1,400 patients with musculoskeletal problems, is working to roll out the RPA-powered PROMs in other local languages by the end of the year to raise by up to 50% the response rate from the current 25%. 

Meanwhile, SGH plans to expand the use of RPA in PROMs collection to other clinical specialties. 

THE LARGER TREND

SGH launched its first RPA use case in contact centre operations back in 2020. Since then, it has explored the use of RPA in extracting and processing information from an online form for Medication Delivery Service, as well as automatic billing of patients for laboratory tests performed at Specialist Outpatient Clinics.

In another recent application of AI at SGH, a predictive tool called CARES-ML (Combined Assessment of Risk Encountered in Surgery-Machine Learning) has been formally deployed to conveniently check patients' fitness for surgery. 

SGH has also recently tapped into VR technology for nurse training. In partnership with Serious Games Asia and sensor solutions developer Microtube Technologies, the hospital developed an immersive gamified training module called IV NIMBLE (Nursing Innovation in Mobility-based Learning) to train nurses in IV cannulation.

ON THE RECORD

"While [RPA] enhances our processes back-end, it may also benefit our patients depending on the use case. [SGH] will continue to look into wider adoption of RPA to take on repetitive manual tasks, and augment clinical workflows. By doing so, staff can focus on more complex work that requires thought process," said Chan Wai Ching, assistant manager of the Artificial Intelligence and Automation Unit and the RPA lead at SGH.