Innovation and intelligent automation

The innovation and intelligent automation team have a dedicated staff of consultants, analysts and application developers who work on a diverse range of projects including artificial intelligence, digital application service design and virtual reality.

The team’s focus is to help take innovation ideas and turn them into products and deliverables for the Royal Free London.

Innovation is the space where great ideas that use technology to improve healthcare can reach their full potential.

The innovation team help make these ideas become reality by supporting teams across the trust, with a track record in devising innovative products and processes that support delivering world class expertise and care.

The intelligent automation team are responsible for delivering Robotic Process Automation (RPA) projects in trusts around the country and here at the Royal Free London. They have utilised automation to save thousands of hours of staff time.

RPA uses code to create robots that can communicate with different systems transferring information, sending out automated emails and completing data entry tasks that would otherwise have to be completed by a person. So far, the team have saved 103,000 hours by automating systems across the country.

Many RPA projects have taken place at the Royal Free London in HR and workforce and also in clinical teams.

For instance, almost 1,000 hours of clinical teams’ time was spent transferring triaging notes from one database to another. The automation has successfully reduced workloads and reduced delays.

The HR department were manually processing job applications – RPA automation began in this team in 2018 and has resulted in an increased speed in processing applications, the reallocation of four full time equivalent jobs, and remaining staff have more time for meaningful discussions about person specifications and job descriptions.

Our vision

For the Royal Free London to be a leader in health innovation – delivering innovation for the NHS by the NHS.

Our mission

To accelerate the Royal Free London’s uptake, culture and delivery of new automations and innovations that deliver for our patients and staff both now and in the future.

Our goals

• To enhance healthcare delivery through service and product innovation.

• To identify and deliver more innovation by increasing routes and opportunities for innovation.

• To inspire the culture and delivery of innovation by increasing capacity, capability and knowledge.

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