on - edited on by
Michael_S
Automation Use Case: Automating the processing of referrals within the healthcare sector
Note: This Blueprint is submitted by the SS&C Blue Prism Professional Services team, and documents a project they delivered as part of a paid service. For more information, contact your account team!
SS&C Blue Prism Professional Services builds an automation to upload large volume of referrals onto a healthcare system.
- Products Used: SS&C Blue Prism Cloud
- Target Department: Healthcare
- Sector: Healthcare and life sciences
Each month, over 2000 PDF referrals are received into a shared mailbox that need to be uploaded onto the target healthcare system in order for patients to be added to the appropriate referral waiting list. Due to the large volumes and repetitive steps, this was an ideal process for automation.
The Design Phase
Through deep-dive sessions alongside the business process Subject Matter Experts (SME’s), the process was meticulously documented via the Process Definition Document (PDD). During these sessions, it was identified that since the referral PDFs follow a standard format, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) could be used in conjunction with SS&C Blue Prism to aid the final automated solution.
Building the automation
The first part of the automation build was to retrieve the PDF referrals from a known file location to then be processed by ABBYY. Once processed and relevant data is extracted via OCR, the PDFs are uploaded to the target healthcare system. Any work items that were unable to be processed by OCR were sent to the ABBYY Verification Station to be reviewed manually.
Testing and improving
Testing was broken down into two stages:
First stage: The developer conducts internal/functional testing. This also includes testing in ABBYY by pushing through large volumes of test batches to ensure the PDF data are extracted correctly and successfully.
Second stage: Once internal testing is complete, User Acceptance Testing (UAT) is conducted by the customer. The customer is able to run the process via Blue Prism Control Room to ensure all in-scope requirements are met. Once signed off, the process is promoted to production.
Moving to production
After validating all applications and credentials are configured correctly on the production virtual workers, the process was promoted to production. The process was scheduled to run small batches at first, gradually ramping up the volume during the Hypercare phase before eventually running at business as usual.
It was identified during build that the target healthcare system was subject to ad-hoc system popups at various points of the process logic. As such, through the use of a component popup handler, known popups were able to be handled. The decision to do this through a component that called reusable generic actions as opposed to specific popup actions meant that any future popups could be added to the component with ease. This also meant minimal changes to the process layer.
The team was able to extract the information ahead of the deadline, which mean the integrity of the data was maintained for the department.
