How Blackpool Teaching Hospitals digitized 100+ processes with no-code automation

Host00:00

We're now moving on to our next session: Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust shares its process automation success story, with FlowForma. Our guests are Laurent Kelly, intelligent automation developer at Blackpool Teaching Hospitals, and Alison Brannigan, process expert at FlowForma.

Alison Brannigan00:26

This session is an interview with Laurent, one of the intelligent automation developers at Blackpool Teaching Hospitals. I'm one of the process automation experts at FlowForma. My role is to work with customers on what they're trying to achieve, so together we can agree whether it makes sense to move forward with FlowForma; it's a very collaborative process. I'll take about three minutes to walk through what FlowForma does, then go into the interview.

Alison Brannigan01:27

We're a dedicated process automation platform with a no-code interface, to empower citizen development if that's the route you want, or to give IT staff an easier, faster way to digitize processes at speed and at scale. The software integrates with your SharePoint and Office 365 tenancy and with your Active Directory through single sign-on.

Alison Brannigan02:00

You can build custom workflows with many points of information that users interact with on a form, generate documents along the way, and surface everything captured in the system through our own analytics tool, so you don't need Power BI or another reporting tool.

Alison Brannigan02:30

We want a really quick return on your investment. Because it's all no-code, the learning curve is quick. It's affordable, with the automation built in rather than priced separately, and whatever your ability to write code, you can manage your own processes yourself, iteratively and with lean principles. We're an award-winning provider, recognized by Forrester and on G2, and a lot of our clients evangelize the system.

Alison Brannigan03:31

People come to talk to me with different drivers. Digital transformation is a key priority for businesses across the globe, and in 2023 the UK Department of Health and Social Care identified the digital transformation of the NHS, an industry we're very strong in, as a top priority. So we invited one of our most accessible customers to talk us through their use cases.

Alison Brannigan04:06

The key drivers include positive outcomes: gaining operational efficiencies, reducing budgets, and getting data and better process insights. FlowForma lets you do all of that through our no-code interface. People also want to know how we've helped others in a similar industry, so please send in questions as Laurent is talking.

Alison Brannigan04:43

Before we jump in, please take part in a quick poll. Where are you on your digital transformation journey? Are you on a 12-month agenda and ready to get started? Not sure where to start and exploring your options? Or have you just started your journey and introduced some new ways of working?

Alison Brannigan05:16

Over half of you have just started on the journey and introduced new ways of working. That's really interesting. Sometimes people aren't sure where to start, and I find it very interesting to understand where people choose to begin and which department is crying out the most.

Alison Brannigan05:50

Laurent, thanks a million for joining us. I've had the pleasure of working with you for the last two years. Would you introduce yourself and Blackpool Teaching Hospitals as a trust?

Laurent Kelly06:07

Absolutely, and thanks for having us. Blackpool Teaching Hospitals is primarily a specialist hospital providing regional care for cardiac and hematology patients. We employ around 8,000 staff, but our IT function supports around 16,000, including GP practices and hospices. We provide hospital services to around 352,000 people on the Fylde Coast in the northwest of England, and community services to 445,000 residents of Blackpool, Fylde, Wyre and North Lancashire. As a teaching hospital, we also provide medical education and training to future and current health professionals.

Laurent Kelly07:01

I've been with the trust since 2022, in the intelligent automation department, which sits under the digital division. Day to day, I develop and manage eForm solutions, FlowForma included, and various automations.

Alison Brannigan07:17

A very busy trust. I know you've digitized over 100 processes. When you embarked on your digital transformation journey, what did you look for in a tool?

Laurent Kelly07:37

Before I joined, the trust used InfoPath, and I believe it stopped using it because support was ending. First and foremost, we looked for a workflow automation tool that could be tailored to any complex departmental business process. It also needed to support interdepartmental processes, fusion teams, where communication, reporting and auditing are the top priority when so many people work on one essential process.

Laurent Kelly08:20

Second, in line with the trust's green plan, we're always looking for paper-free ways of capturing data. We also wanted an out-of-the-box solution that could be distributed easily with very little setup time, and that we could train people on even if they don't have specialist IT knowledge, such as coding.

Alison Brannigan08:54

Did you ever go into the Power Platform?

Laurent Kelly09:03

Personally, no, and I don't think our department ever has. We've used FlowForma the whole time, as far as I'm aware.

Alison Brannigan09:18

I ask because we sit in the SharePoint and Office 365 environment, and sometimes people say they'll just use what they have. The Power Platform is great, but we find it struggles with processes we'd consider quite complex. Can you talk about the complexity of your processes, and how many have multiple stakeholders and steps?

Laurent Kelly09:54

We have some really complex projects that need up to eight signatures, anywhere from finance to payroll all the way up to the executives. There are a lot of moving parts, and FlowForma definitely simplifies the approval process and the digital communication between steps. It's extremely handy and extremely time-saving.

Alison Brannigan10:30

With so many stakeholders, if a staff member is out sick, how easy is it to delegate a process?

Laurent Kelly10:42

Very easy, and it happens all the time. With so many processes and so many people signing them off, it's incredibly useful to be able to reassign forms to get another signature. It keeps the process moving rather than putting a stop to it, so we can get it signed off and reach the end.

Alison Brannigan11:07

That's what we always focus on: eradicating bottlenecks and removing the manual onus on somebody to check up on whether something has been done. The system takes all of that away from you.

Alison Brannigan11:31

Could you give a high-level overview of who uses it across the trust on a daily basis?

Laurent Kelly11:39

First, where we started with FlowForma. I believe HR is the biggest department using it. Before my time, we started with the new starter form, a very complex HR process to help onboard new staff, so we jumped right in. It required sign-off from various departments: recruitment, digital identity, IT and payroll. It also needed to go backwards and forwards, not just in a straight line, because wrong data entered early on might need to be corrected later, and that's an amazing feature.

Laurent Kelly12:37

Off the back of that, we recently developed around six forms for HR, including the case management system, an assignment change for when an employee changes roles, and flexible working. As for who uses the forms, it's literally everybody, in clinical and non-clinical departments: from finance to HR, wards doing sanitary checks, and our charity, Blue Skies, which takes funding applications through FlowForma.

Laurent Kelly13:12

We've also recently developed a digital portal, so staff can submit new project requests, changes and requests for advice, and they get triaged to the right department. Literally anybody, from staff members to execs all the way to the CEO, uses FlowForma: doctors, nurses, consultants and other clinicians, and the corporate workforce. Because demand is so high, we also train people not just to submit forms but to use the system, delegate and even build forms.

Alison Brannigan13:59

So you actually have a training program to enable other departments, so they don't rely solely on IT?

Laurent Kelly14:12

Essentially, yes. We've had such high demand for FlowForma processes that we put together a small training package. I jump on a call and teach people how to set up a form and add some basic questions. Pretty much anybody gets it straight away, even if they're not IT literate. I think we have around seven live forms built by people trained within the trust, not by my department, and a handful more people who can now manage forms, so they don't need to come back and ask us how to redelegate. We give them the access, teach them, and they do it themselves.

Alison Brannigan15:05

And you give them a development and training environment that isn't the live production environment?

Laurent Kelly15:13

Yes, of course. We set up a test site and tell them they can't break it, so go ahead and try. Or we build them a site and don't turn it live until they're ready and we've signed off the process. It always comes back to us for a review, and we usually book another session to see if there's anything else they'd like. For the more complex things we'll help, but generally the form is up and running and ready to go.

Alison Brannigan15:44

Someone has commented that 100-plus processes sounds like a lot. When do you consider a process to have been digitized?

Laurent Kelly16:00

Good question. I'd say it's any process you can consider sped up in its time to complete. Not all processes go from paper to digital. A great example is a Word document passed around multiple departments, signed, printed and scanned. It's always a tangible result to see a process sped up, and we get feedback saying it's really helped.

Alison Brannigan16:49

That's the benefit you're going to see. We're always trying to remove manual, paper-based, email-based or Excel-based processes from an organization.

Laurent Kelly17:14

The main benefit is reduced paper consumption, and as I said, it could be an email trail, Excel or a Word document. It speeds things up. There's also staff exposure to FlowForma processes: the more we build, the more exposure we get, and staff are asking for more, which is why we put the training initiative in place.

Laurent Kelly17:48

One of the biggest benefits, especially for departments like payroll and finance, is a comprehensive audit trail of every record. They can see any form that's been submitted, the date, who submitted it, and where it's up to, if they need to push it on. That's great for producing reports too. And people around the trust love being able to submit a form, have a PDF generated, and move it into a folder or store it.

Laurent Kelly18:37

This particular process was the original project request system, a 46-page document that I'm told took over an hour to complete, or longer depending on its complexity. In FlowForma, it's become an eight- or nine-step process with only a handful of questions on the first page: what is your project, who needs to sign it off. It goes to senior manager approval, gets triaged to the right department so they can get expert help on their project, and carries on until it's approved or rejected.

Laurent Kelly19:30

It's only been up around seven months, and we've already had over 100 requests. People find it so much easier to submit project requests this way than with the lengthy document, and we've had a lot of praise for it.

Laurent Kelly19:53

On reporting: the project request system in FlowForma exports to SQL, so we have the raw data captured, and we set that up for the project team so they could build a dashboard. It shows where projects are up to, what stage they're at, how many are in each category, and even a breakdown by division. Our reporting team built it, and it shows the possibilities are there to take that data and use it in many ways.

Alison Brannigan20:38

So in summary, you've made everyone's life a little bit easier, so the trust can focus on patient care. You've removed ambiguity about how to do things and given people back time, so nobody has to fill out that 46-page document, among all the other processes you've digitized.

Host21:19

We have a question from Alina: were all the processes documented before you started implementing FlowForma?

Laurent Kelly21:33

Good question. I believe most of them were. Certainly since I started and picked up the FlowForma system, processes have been documented and sent to me, either in their original format so I could build from that, or via a project definition document, where they define the variables and what they need from it.

Host22:05

We're also asked: how do you suggest organizations prioritize processes for digitization? Are some processes better to start with? You mentioned starting with HR.

Laurent Kelly22:19

We jumped in at the deep end with a very complex program, but that set us up to build any complex program. For prioritizing, I'd look at the tangible things, like how much time it will save; that's probably the biggest one. We also hear how processes were carried out before. We had one where somebody was literally walking a document to the executives and the CEO, and the time saved by digitizing that is incredible. So I'd prioritize the quick wins, then use them to build the more complex stuff.

Host23:20

Taking away grunt work and saving time, and time is money. Another question: does FlowForma offer support or training to get you started?

Alison Brannigan23:48

Yes. Even before you sign, we offer our consultancy, so we can workshop your ideas, and a supported trial environment. Once you're onboarded, you get an intensive hand-holding period: a customer success agent works with you, and our promise is to get your first process live, with our full, undivided attention for the first six weeks. You also have a 12-month support agreement, a customer support portal, the customer success team, and self-paced learning academy licenses.

Host24:43

We could do one more. Are the forms launched from whatever app the user is working in? For example, might a care plan approval form be launched from the patient's electronic medical record?

Alison Brannigan24:58

There are various ways to launch a form. Laurent and his team use their intranet or a portal. You can also embed a form in a QR code or barcode, for example a sticker for incident reports, and it's available on mobile phones and tablets. On the desktop, you can bookmark a form, such as an annual leave request, and because you authenticate with your Microsoft credentials, it's on your phone too.

Host25:47

One more quick question: how do you empower transformation across all departments and get everyone on board?

Alison Brannigan26:07

Culture is a big thing. Organizations with a top-down drive for digital transformation do best. Another strong element of FlowForma is that we give people back time. If we're saying we'll make your life easier, keep information within the company because everything is captured in a process, and stop you having to think about who to contact, adoption becomes widespread across the organization. Who doesn't want to get on board with that?

Host26:46

That's a lovely way to end the session. We've run out of time, but feel free to connect with Laurent and Alison on LinkedIn. Thank you so much for a great conversation.