The data strategy promised by the U.K. government health provider in November is expected to be published this week and will lean heavily on RPA and intelligent automation to improve the health system’s user experience, the National Health Service (NHS) said in an announcement in advance of the publication.
The NHS explicitly noted that RPA will automate back-office processes that will eventually save the agency more than half a million hours by 2025. The proposal, which will be open for public comment after its release, aims to leverage the technology to improve access to information by both physicians and patients.
“Data saves lives, and has saved thousands of lives in the past year,” said Matthew Gould, chief executive of NHSX, the health agency’s technology unit. “Safe access to a patient’s data allows a doctor to make the right diagnosis and offer patients the right treatment. Safe access to aggregated data-driven research into new treatments like dexamethasone for Covid-19, which has now saved over a million lives. The new data strategy will set out our vision to go further, to learn from the pandemic, to save more lives with data, to use technology to ensure patient privacy is even better protected, and to give patients more control of their health records.”
AI and RPA are being used in trials that will reduce the need for two radiologists to review breast cancer scans to one, freeing the other to see patients, according to the announcement.