A lack of efficient and productive processes within the NHS continue to hamper its progression towards a modern-day health care provider. Too much reliance on manual input and repetitive tasks are holding back Trusts’ ability to deliver more cost-effective, efficient services.
With a growing workforce, up to 1.2 million nationwide in October 2017, management of identities and access can become a significant time drain. Multiple applications and services create ongoing repetitive swivel chair exercises to add or remove employees and manage access permissions.
Seek to remove NHS toil
The struggle to modernise the NHS with productive technologies and solutions has resulted in a different type of capacity drain. Enabling more effective digital working at the front end, has resulted in IT and HR teams taking on increasingly repetitive tasks.
Analyst firm Gartner describes such tasks as ‘digitally avoidable toil’; tactical and manual work that could and should be automated. By creating a more efficient administration support for these systems, removing the toil delivers value-based care to patients.
If not addressed, as the NHS continues to digitalise, the weight of administrative tasks on IT and other supporting departments will become an increasing burden. Such counterproductive tasks are avoidable by understanding and scoping out the full impact of any new system implementation.
Many of these additional admin and input tasks can, and should, be automated to maximise productivity across all departments, as well as increase security.
Effective access management
Data entry, adding and removing employees, applying access permissions – can all suffer from human error. Forgetting to erase a leaver, adding access to the wrong employee or simply inserting incorrect personal data.
Systems, such as BDS Solutions Directory Manager can automate the link between the Trust’s Active Directory, ESR and NHSmail. By automating identity and access management practices, a trust can ensure that the same identical details are all held in the necessary systems.
Access to systems are efficiently removed for people leaving Trusts, and safeguards are put in place to ensure the right workers have access to the right systems.
This further increases the productivity of front-line staff, as well as limiting the administration onus on IT and HR functions. Capping the reliance of staff to complete tasks that can and should be automated, will further progress the NHS towards its digitalisation goal.
NHS toil free effectiveness
Collaborative technologies have vastly enriched the NHS’ delivery of care to patients, yet as some systems have been upgraded to the modern idealisms of a technologically-apt NHS, it has created an unproductive knock-on effect to other processes and departments. The NHS must ensure automation is applied to tackle this so-called ‘toil’, so it can surge ahead and effectively realise further digitalisation gains.