Singapore General Hospital, Singapore’s flagship hospital, has been exploring robotic process automation.

Meanwhile many RPA automation use cases have been successfully implemented, saving 52,500 man-hours and gaining almost $2 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 about 1,350 hours of manual calculations and documentation.

SGH launched its first RPA use case in contact centre operations. 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.

“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 Mr Chan, assistant manager of the Artificial Intelligence and Automation Unit and the RPA lead at SGH.