Lillestrøm municipality used a digital employee to register covid-19 vaccination appointments

Challenge
Lillestrøm municipality is Norway’s ninth-largest municipality and has approximately 86.500 inhabitants. Like all Norwegian municipalities, Lillestrøm municipality had to prioritize work processes and business areas connected with the COVID-19 pandemic that has not previously been in focus. One of these new areas is mass vaccination of the municipality’s inhabitants.

When the inhabitants of Lillestrøm municipality were to be vaccinated continuously with available vaccines, the municipality’s medical record system had to handle the vaccination process. The municipality’s medical record system was initially not intended for this number of transactions and type of registrations.

In the absence of a good booking solution for the inhabitants, Lillestrøm municipality chose to develop its own booking solution, which was in production until they implemented a new function in their business application to handle the process.

Due to a lack of integration between the booking solution and the medical record system, the appointments had to be registered manually in the medical record system. The number of vaccines received could vary significantly from week to week, corresponding to workload.

Solution
Lillestrøm municipality contacted Digital Workforce for an assessment of the process’ suitability for RPA automation.
The initial analysis concluded that a digital employee (RPA) could automate citizens’ enrolment in the vaccine program and complete registration in the medical record system. Digital Workforce provided an established RPA cloud solution to Lillestrøm municipality, which they could easily scale with the capacity to handle the large workload, and Digital Workforce was able to set up the cloud platform with a new digital employee two days after the municipality’s order.

The work process was documented, developed, tested and put into production within a week. A quick turnaround was possible because the municipality provided the necessary competent professional resources who collaborated with Digital Workforce’s RPA analysts and RPA developers. The co-operation resulted in a quick process description and an agile development process where verification of the solution aligned with the development process, which in turn enabled a rapid production set up.

In the production-based solution, vaccination appointments could be retrieved automatically from the booking system’s database and registered in the medical record system with the ordered vaccination time. With an updated medical record system, the digital employee wrote the appointment status directly back to the booking system – giving the vaccination team a complete overview of the individual order.

During the three weeks that the digital employees were in production, a large number of vaccination appointments were registered, which saved the municipality about 260 hours (approx. 35 working days) of manual work.

The digital employees who handled the vaccination registration have retired since the municipality’s business application now runs this process.

A quote from the Director of digitization, Torbjørn Pedersen, in Lillestrøm municipality:
“Lillestrøm municipality needed to automate the processes related to registration of appointments for COVID-19 vaccination. The municipality had established a solution where the inhabitants themselves could choose the time for vaccination. Still, the medical record system where the vaccination itself was registered lacked an interface for this. In other words, there was a need to register a relatively high number of hourly appointments manually. The municipality contacted Digital Workforce and managed to establish an RPA process that made the registration within a few days. There is no doubt that the RPA solution was crucial to our ability to deliver a user-friendly self-service vaccination solution. We saved a lot of time in a few weeks and at the same time ensured high precision and quality in the registration. Lillestrøm municipality is very satisfied with the expertise and collaboration with Digital Workforce, which can deliver quickly and with high quality.”