Thanks to robot Florence, elderly no longer have to wait for home care 

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Marieke Verlaan-Snieders is a general practitioner at GP Leonard Springer and CMIO at the HZK.

Sarah van Voorbergen is policy officer for District Oriented Care at the HZK.

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Every senior the right care

Huisartsen Zuid Kennemerland (HZK) is the partnership of the hundred general practitioners' practices in the region. One of the types of care that the general practitioners offer together is District Oriented Care. This ensures that every vulnerable elderly person in Zuid-Kennemerland receives the proper attention and can continue to live safely in their own home for as long as possible. HKZ works together with home care organizations for this. With such a collaboration between multiple parties, administrative hassle lurks because the ICT systems are not compatible.

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Robot Florence

Marieke Verlaan, CMIO (Chief Medical Informations Officer) at HZK: "In District Care, we are in a situation where there is a lot of red tape and we cannot change that. That's why we are deploying software robot Florence who can take over this." Sarah van Voorbergen, Policy Officer for District Oriented Care at HZK: "Right now Florence is taking over 4-5 hours from our care workers."

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"Elderly people had to wait three to four days for home care like that," he said.

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No more manual searching

But what exactly does Florence - indeed, after Florence Nightingale - help with?

Marieke: "When I as a GP have a frail elderly person in my practice and want to call in home care I send a message from my GP information system. Florence then links the patient to a home care worker. And sends me a message when it is actually picked up. Sarah: "This makes it fast, structured and error-free for the GP. As a policy officer, I no longer have to manually look for a nurse to send by the patient." 

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Instant help for the elderly

Florence thus makes the work of general practice more efficient, which is especially important for the elderly. Marieke: "They no longer have to wait for nursing. Previously, a file could sometimes end up on top of a pile and stay there before it was forwarded to a nurse. If the person who was supposed to forward it was on vacation, it could lie around for a while. Now there is immediate follow-up because the robot Florence forwards it. Normally the files were processed twice a week, so then as a patient you could wait three to four days for help."

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"Florence works fast, structured and error-free."

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Digital innovation

That Florence eases the work of the practice is obvious, but how did HZK actually come up with the idea of using Yarado? Marieke: "I attended a working session on Robotic Process Automation (RPA) from Connect4Care, a party dedicated to digital innovation in healthcare. I immediately saw the possibilities. Our administrative processes are often so wooden. In elder care, I saw the most gain to be made so we deployed robot Florence here as a test case and we like it very much." 

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All beginnings are easy

Sarah: "It was very easy to get started with Yarado. The lines of communication are very short. We could immediately make appointments and recordings of the steps I had to go through manually before. Then Yarado started building that and we started testing it. Within two weeks we were online. You don't need any developer skills, it works very intuitively. Menno from Yarado put the entire application together for us. Sarah: "Yarado is a fast, accessible way to get rid of your administrative hassles. It's all well explained, very clear what's happening." Marieke: "Yarado also adjusts things very quickly if something is not going well. The service level is very high."

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"Yarado is a fast, approachable way to get rid of your hassles."

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Deletion sessions

This is a better solution than the one devised by the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport (VWS). Marieke: "There has been more attention for it in recent years, also at the national level. For example, scrapping sessions were devised by VWS, but they didn't really help. That was a bit of fighting forms with forms."

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Purple crocodile

Forms are already plentiful at a general practice. Marieke: "The most offensive is the purple crocodile referral. That term comes from an OHRA advertisement in which a girl has forgotten her purple crocodile in the pool and has to fill out all kinds of forms while the crocodile stands in plain sight behind the desk clerk. We call this type of referral that because it is quite useless. Patients have to come and get such a form because they need a certain check mark from the doctor for their health insurance, but not because anything of medical knowledge is being asked of the doctor. Very frustrating. It's a blank referral. Of course, a robot could pick this up that way, too."

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Mail processing is next

Plenty to automate in healthcare, but the focus at HZK will soon be on mail processing. Marieke: "In the near future, we want to work on the referral letters that come in. The biggest pressure is on our physician assistants. We really have shortages there, this is a national problem by the way. We want them to have to process fewer letters and be able to talk to people more. I estimate that as a general practice we spend 2 hours a day processing mail, so a quarter of the day. It would be great if we could become more efficient at this."