The Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust puts education first with RPA accelerated eLearning registrations

Providing acute services to over half a million residents across Wakefield and North Kirklees, it’s crucial that staff working across The Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust’s three hospitals have access to all of the necessary training resources. As part of an ambitious 12-month pilot, a key focus of the Trust was to automate its eLearning registration process – ensuring healthcare workers can access learning as quickly as possible.

The challenge

In order to ensure proper use of its clinical systems, the Trust provides virtual eLearning via the Digital Learning Solution (DLS) for its wide range of healthcare staff. To provide access to the DLS, the Digital Training Team completes registration for each user within the Learning Management System (LMS), creating unique login details and course enrolments for every account.

Registration requests are often received in large batches, from both internal and external staff members. Including registrations received from temporary locum and agency staff, the Digital Training Team can often process hundreds of registrations at any one time.

The original process

Before implementing Robotic Process Automation (RPA), the Digital Training Team processed all of its registration requests manually, between core working hours of 08:30am and 5pm each weekday. To complete these registrations, the process was as follows:

• A Digital Training Team member would log into the LMS to register each learner individually
• The generated registration ID for each learner was then recorded
• The learner was then enrolled into each required online course, one by one
• Registration confirmation and login details were then manually emailed to each learner upon completion

What wasn’t working?

While uncomplicated, the manual nature of the process meant each registration would take around five minutes per learner – with a full cohort of 200 registrations taking the whole team around one and a half days to complete. The process was also monotonous and repetitive, making it prone to errors and negative impacts on mental health for staff.

As the team is also responsible for the full delivery and facilitation of all training across the Trust, the original DLS registration process was a resource-heavy task. It’s estimated that, within the time it would take to complete 200 registrations, each team member could have delivered three 90-minute training classes.

The solution

As part of its search for a more efficient DLS registration process, the Trust decided to automate a portion of its requests - alongside four other admin automation projects within the same 12-month pilot period. Using NDL Automate, it designed a streamlined approach that would first be applied to doctor DLS registrations on a testing basis, before it was then deployed for all other healthcare staff.

All registration requests are populated into a database, where a bot then automatically creates a unique account for each learner with the required information. The process was further improved during the pilot phase - based on the learner’s job title, the bot can now enrol learner’s onto only the relevant eLearning courses.

Successfully completed registrations trigger an automatic email to learners, providing them with account confirmations and login details. Where bots detect errors, such as duplicate learner accounts in the LMS, cases would be flagged to the Digital Learning Team for further investigation – reducing errors and failed registrations overall.

During a test, a doctor’s account was enrolled from registration request onto four required eLearning courses. The bot completed the task and sent a confirmation email within 1 minute and 29 seconds - where the same process took an experienced administrator 5 minutes and 24 seconds, resulting in a time reduction of 72.5%.

The benefits

Since implementing the new automated process, a full cohort of 200 DLS registrations is now completed within 90 minutes, as opposed to one and a half days by the Digital Learning Team. Not only does this mean internal healthcare staff have quicker access to a number of important learning resources - but locum and agency workers too.

With the reduction of repetitive and monotonous tasks, the Digital Learning Team has observed positive mental health and wellbeing impacts, as well as an increased capacity to deliver training, improving both employee and patient experience.

• 24/7 processing of eLearning registrations
• Relief of resource and time demands
• Elimination of repetitive, monotonous tasks
• Reduction in account errors
• Increased capacity for training

What’s next?

Following the success of the automated DLS registration process, alongside the Trust’s numerous other pilot projects, its engaged team and users continue to identify new projects for digital transformations. To learn how RPA could benefit your public sector organisation, don’t hesitate to get in touch with the team – and make sure to read more about the NDL Evolve Transformation Suite in action, over on the Success Stories page.

Image Rights: Bill Henderson / The Main Entrance, Pinderfields Hospital, Wakefield