Hospitals are under increasing pressure. Demand for healthcare continues to grow, while teams face staff shortages and heavy administrative workloads. In particular, scheduling appointments and managing waiting lists require significant daily time and attention from healthcare professionals. This was also a major challenge at Albert Schweitzer hospital. Staff spent a significant amount of time each day scheduling patient appointments, including related tasks such as arranging tests, processing lab requests, and preparing lab forms.
This workload quickly increased, particularly in departments with high patient volumes, such as surgery. Approximately 100 to 150 orders were processed manually each day. This repetitive work made the process prone to errors and caused delays in the care chain during peak periods.
Automated processes in practice
Together with Harborn, Albert Schweitzer hospital explored how Robotic Process Automation (RPA) could take over repetitive steps, reduce workload, and give healthcare professionals more time for patient contact. The collaboration resulted in the following:
- Digital assistant for appointment scheduling: For high-volume outpatient clinics, two scalable RPA robots support clinic staff in processing and scheduling follow-up appointments. The robots automatically link patients to the correct waiting list, specialist, and scheduling code.
- Consultation preparation: This preparation robot was developed for physicians and prepares appointments from a clinical perspective. It checks whether tests such as radiology, laboratory, or microbiology exams have been performed since the last visit. If available, the robot collects the results and adds them to the patient record. Physicians can find all relevant information in one place and no longer need to retrieve it manually from different systems. This allows them to start consultations better prepared.
- Data processing in diabetes care: In diabetes care, a robot ensures automatic data transfer between pump systems and the Electronic Patient Record (EPR). Manual processing, which previously took several minutes per patient, has been replaced by automatic verification and transfer. Thanks to the modular design, additional pump types can be added in the future.
- Support for care administration and specialist centers: In care administration, robots are used to automatically correct end dates of procedures. For the sleep-wake center, sleep data is transferred directly into the EPR. This prevents retyping, reduces the margin of error, and improves data quality. It also enables analyses based on the entered data.
All solutions can be monitored through a dashboard that provides real-time insight into volumes, time savings, failure reasons, and any error messages. Deviations are quickly visible and can be followed up in a targeted way, while healthcare professionals retain control over exceptions.
