How Blackpool Teaching Hospitals built a culture of collaboration with no-code automation

Anna00:05

Hello and welcome back to PEX Network All Access: Low Code 2023. In this webinar, Breaking the Mould with No-Code Process Automation, we'll hear a success story from Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. I'm delighted to introduce our speakers: Paul Stone from FlowForma, and Martyn McKechnie, head of digital identity and system administration at Blackpool Teaching Hospitals. Paul, Martyn, over to you.

Paul Stone00:41

Thanks very much, Anna. Martyn, maybe you'd like to introduce yourself?

Martyn McKechnie00:47

As Anna said, I'm the head of digital identity and system administration for Blackpool Teaching Hospitals. I've been employed in the NHS since 2006.

Paul Stone01:03

And I'm Paul Stone from FlowForma. I align our digital process automation product with market requirements, and I work with lots of customers like Blackpool to help them get maximum value out of the product. Today we're going to talk to Martyn about Blackpool's experience of using FlowForma, starting with a little background on the trust.

Paul Stone01:44

Martyn, could you tell us a little about Blackpool Teaching Hospitals and what they do?

Martyn McKechnie01:50

Blackpool Teaching Hospitals employs roughly 8,000 staff directly, but as an IT function we support approximately 16,000 staff across GP practices, out-of-hours services and hospices. I've worked in the NHS for 17 years, initially for a primary care trust, then transferring to the hospital in 2012.

Martyn McKechnie02:15

My role covers two functions. One manages the digital identity of the workforce: always knowing who everybody is, where they work, in what capacity and for how long, and provisioning and deprovisioning system accounts. The other provides configuration support for a number of clinical systems, from setting up wards and day diaries to letter templates.

Paul Stone02:48

It's quite a large hospital, one of the larger ones in the UK, and it has several different sites. So it's a complicated scenario, and I'm sure the requirements for digitization are pretty complex too.

Paul Stone03:10

What challenges motivated you to look for a process automation tool?

Martyn McKechnie03:25

We had a wide range of departments with bespoke processes, a lot of them delivered through paper, email and telephone. That often meant requests were overlooked, or it introduced delays or mistakes, and extra time was needed to familiarize new staff with each bespoke process.

Martyn McKechnie03:45

With such a big user base working across multiple locations, and processes ranging from daily to monthly, the evidence showed that staff would often forget how to complete them. That dramatically increased resolution times and staff frustration.

Martyn McKechnie04:10

Lastly, service users spent extra time phoning and emailing to find out where a process was up to. In multi-department processes, a requester might have to contact several departments just to find out who the process currently sat with.

Paul Stone04:32

I know from my own interactions with hospitals that it can be quite difficult to find out the status of things. Information can be stuck in an email account waiting to be processed. Even where you have a centralized system, such as a patient record system, if the process isn't automated it's hard to know where things are at any point in time.

Paul Stone05:04

What were Blackpool Teaching Hospitals' requirements for a process automation tool?

Martyn McKechnie05:24

We had previous experience with another solution, InfoPath. Support for it came to an end, and we felt it had a number of shortcomings: it required a lot of technical involvement and workarounds to achieve what we needed.

Martyn McKechnie05:37

When we looked at FlowForma, it offered a very simple, intuitive no-code approach. That made it easy to create consistent processes quickly, and because it's so simple, we could delegate those processes out to departments to oversee and manage.

Martyn McKechnie05:58

While it offers simple functions out of the box, it also caters for more complex requirements, such as reading from and writing to SQL. Another huge benefit is how easy it is to understand the user permissions on each step, so we can be confident we're following our information governance rules and only the appropriate users can access certain sets of data.

Paul Stone06:40

That's quite a complex set of requirements. With InfoPath you had to do a lot of coding to create solutions, so implementing digital processes with it would have been a real struggle. This must have been quite a big step forward.

Martyn McKechnie07:02

Absolutely. InfoPath required a particular skill set, and with all our bespoke processes we needed to delegate that responsibility out. So we needed a much simpler tool to do that.

Paul Stone07:17

Could you tell us about some of the processes you've automated?

Martyn McKechnie07:27

So far we've automated approximately 55, probably a little more than that now. Many of them are in HR, because there are a lot of complex HR processes around pay and employment.

Martyn McKechnie07:51

Some of the simpler forms, such as our accommodation request and raising concerns forms, were deployed in a matter of hours. More complex forms pass through five or more departments, such as our payroll assignment change form and our new starter form.

Martyn McKechnie08:23

Some forms escalate to senior management, such as requests for agency spend, which go to the chief executive; that's obviously a hot topic at the minute. And we've got forms such as clinical safety checks and audit tools that we put in place following a CQC visit. So quite a diverse range of processes.

Paul Stone08:49

To start off with over 55 processes digitized is doing it at real scale, and covering a lot of bases. Trying to do that with old tools like InfoPath would have been extremely difficult; I think it would have been pretty much impossible. A no-code tool that's quick to deploy really helps in scaling up process automation across the trust.

Paul Stone09:40

Let's talk about the outcomes. You've digitized 55 processes; what benefits have you seen?

Martyn McKechnie09:51

The main thing is consistency. We now have a consistent approach to completing processes, which gives staff much more familiarity, and improves the speed and accuracy with which forms are completed. That reduces the administrative and, in a hospital setting, the clinical burden.

Martyn McKechnie10:12

Processes are quick to deploy from start to finish, and there's less time spent chasing where processes are up to, which was one of our biggest issues. It's also prompted departments to review their own internal processes and make sure they're fit for purpose. It's gaining traction the more we go with it, because departments have seen these improvements.

Martyn McKechnie10:44

Lastly, it's reduced the burden on our in-house development team. They're freed up to concentrate on key critical projects, because a lot of the work we can delegate out to departments to oversee their own processes.

Paul Stone11:09

That's fantastic. IT resources are always short of time, with too many things to do, so if you're going to digitize processes you want to do it quickly and easily. The system also lets you pass it out to business users to digitize processes themselves. I know that's in your plans, and we have other clients who've gone past that stage and have business people out in the field digitizing their own processes.

Paul Stone12:18

It's great you've seen those positive outcomes already. What do you see as the next steps for Blackpool?

Martyn McKechnie12:38

It's building on what we've got. There are probably thousands of processes across the hospital, so we're going for our biggest hitters, the ones that cause the most headaches and the most complex ones, and migrating more of those, while also delegating that responsibility out to departments to oversee them. That will make things even more efficient.

Martyn McKechnie13:05

We'll also keep reviewing new functionality from FlowForma to see how we can embed it in our existing and new processes. There's functionality we'd like to explore but haven't implemented yet, such as the governance module. It's gaining traction now, and the organization is seeing the real benefits.

Paul Stone13:30

To get that many processes digitized in such a short time frame is really significant. It gets the snowball rolling, and then it's a matter of keeping that momentum going to digitize at scale. People see a return on one complex process and want to stop and take a breather, but the real trick with process automation is to digitize at scale.

Paul Stone14:20

You started in the IT department and plan to roll it out to the business next; other clients go all in and get business people building from day one. Whichever approach you take, you can measure and demonstrate your progress, and use those outcomes to generate more interest across the business. Digitizing one process is all well and good, but digitizing many gives you a significant multiple on the benefits.

Paul Stone15:21

A little about FlowForma: we're a digital process automation company with over 200,000 people using our product in more than 20 countries. We're dedicated to letting people digitize without specialist skills, so they can digitize at scale. We target business people primarily, but IT departments use it too, because it's so quick. It's not low code; it's really no code.

Paul Stone16:05

It's also a little different from many process automation tools, because you're not just digitizing the tasks, you're digitizing the data that's captured. As Martyn said, you can standardize your processes so they perform predictably every time, and capture and validate data as you move through the process. It's not just workflow or data: it's documents, communications, everything about a process, all in one solution, running on the Microsoft platform.

Paul Stone17:16

With time being limited, we should move on. Do we have any questions from the audience?

Anna17:30

Yes, we do. We also have a poll. Everyone will be able to see the poll question on their screen, so please vote and we'll see the results soon.

Paul Stone18:28

No surprise there: productivity is leading. Most people look at process automation as a way to improve productivity, and it's also a way to measure it. With digital processes you automatically get a full audit trail, so you know how each process is performing.

Paul Stone19:01

It's very interesting to see customer experience second. That's something we often see as a side benefit of digitizing processes, and often an unexpected one: an improved customer experience score. I imagine that's really important in the NHS, because your patients are your primary concern.

Anna19:36

We have time for questions now. The first: what tool was used for managing the workflow of tasks and maintaining their status?

Martyn McKechnie20:20

Essentially, FlowForma is managing the workflow of tasks and maintaining the status for us. That's one of its benefits: we can clearly see where a task is up to.

Paul Stone20:42

I wonder if the question was about the previous tool. From that perspective, InfoPath was used to capture data, but for tasks I imagine it was email chains.

Martyn McKechnie21:00

There was such a variety of processes before. Even InfoPath was only maintaining a couple of processes, because of the complexity of arranging it, and that was managed by a separate in-house development team. One of the benefits of FlowForma was that it could pass to my system administration team, without the skill set InfoPath required, because of the no-code approach.

Anna21:48

Another question, from Neil: on this journey, did you use any intelligent document processing (IDP) tools? If so, did you face any challenges extracting data from forms, and how did you manage handwritten documents or forms?

Martyn McKechnie22:09

For all the processes we've automated so far, we're not running any intelligent document processing just yet.

Paul Stone22:19

We do have other customers who use OCR to pull information from a document image into FlowForma forms, then process it through a workflow. OCR isn't always right, so the form validates the information and gives you a chance to correct it before it moves through the process. We have a number of clients using that, and we can talk to you about it in more detail.

Anna23:03

Another question, from Matthew: how was the transition from InfoPath?

Martyn McKechnie23:19

For a lot of it, we started from scratch, because it gave us an opportunity to review. The InfoPath processes were managed by a specialized development team. When we saw how simple it was to create flows in FlowForma, we didn't want to get bogged down converting InfoPath's complexity. It was easier to readdress the flow with the department and make sure it worked the way they wanted.

Martyn McKechnie24:01

It's such a simple approach to making flows that, for the first time, you can engage directly with the people who'll use them; in our case, the HR department, who usually aren't very technical. It was easy for them to visualize the flow and work with us to create it.

Anna24:35

Another question asks about the number of employees needed to automate 55 processes a year.

Martyn McKechnie25:05

It's difficult to answer, because the simplicity of the approach means you don't need a centralized team: it can be delegated out to departments, who incorporate it into their business-as-usual work. A process can be created in a matter of hours from start to finish; our most complex process probably took a few days. So it depends on how centralized or decentralized you go, and how complex your processes are.

Anna26:04

Thanks a lot, Martyn and Paul. Before we finish, would you like to say anything to our audience?

Paul Stone26:15

The important message is that you can digitize processes at scale, and it's not difficult to get started. As Martyn said, you can digitize a process in a few hours. You don't need to document your processes in detail first: you can build a process straight away, get end users testing it and giving feedback, so you can start very quickly.

Martyn McKechnie26:52

I think I've done enough talking. It's a straightforward approach to producing your workflows: it does what it says on the tin.

Anna27:23

One more question just popped up. Paul mentioned OCR for other clients: does FlowForma have ICR capabilities for extracting data from unstructured documents or forms, and any signature capability?

Paul Stone27:45

On signatures, FlowForma integrates with DocuSign, so you can request and recognize digital signatures on documents. We also capture wet signatures on mobile devices; we do a lot of work with construction companies capturing signatures in the field. And FlowForma can pull information from other documents into forms, then manipulate the data once it's inside. There's a lot to talk about there, so give us a call.

Anna28:47

We're running out of time, but feel free to reach out to Paul on LinkedIn and he'll be able to help. Thanks so much, Paul and Martyn, for a very interesting conversation.