As part of its digital transformation, Seoul National University Hospital has recently implemented robotic process automation to automate repetitive administrative tasks.
The in-house RPA system was applied to nine key administrative workflows, including medical record audits and monthly statistical reporting.
“Approximately 11% of daily record management tasks were automated, resulting in a 70% reduction in processing time. Two statistical reporting tasks achieved full (100%) automation, improving both accuracy and turnaround time,” the hospital shared in a statement.
The RPA is also helping save the hospital approximately 76.5 hours of work per hour – equivalent to almost half of full-time employee hours.
“These saved hours are being reallocated to higher-value activities such as research support, with expectations that broader adoption across departments will yield significant productivity gains,” SNUH said.
The system went live in July last year, and since then, it has been maintained by staff members who went through prior technical training. To prepare for this implementation, SNUH had to restructure some manual processes and transform unstructured data from its clinical data warehouse, which was then fed into the RPA system.
According to the hospital, the RPA system received an average satisfaction score of 95 out of 100 from an internal survey conducted in September. Statistical automation was considered the most approved feature.
SNUH is now considering expanding the RPA into other hospital departments, including the pharmacy division and the same-day surgery centre.
THE LARGER CONTEXT
SNUH recently migrated its 30 core IT systems, including HIS and PACS, to an external Internet Data Center. This move to an external data centre, which is based on software-defined data centre (SDDC) infrastructure, enables the hospital to scale its adoption of advanced technologies, including AI and big data. Recently, the hospital unveiled two big AI projects: a medical large language model (LLM), which it claims to be a country-first, and an LLM-driven clinical decision support system for precision medicine treatment.
It also sets the foundation for centralising its clinical data warehouse systems and delivering personalised care services leveraging the MyData platforms. Early this year, SNUH and its affiliate hospitals in Boramae and Bundang consolidated their common data model platforms to enable network-wide research and collaborations.
“A range of factors, including rising maintenance costs from ageing infrastructure, increased risk of system failure, and the need to adopt big data-driven care environments, collectively informed the decision to transition to a more agile and flexible SDDC-based IT infrastructure,” it explained in a statement.
The phased migration, which took a total of 16 months from design to stabilisation, was touted as a first for a hospital in South Korea. HIMSS also noted SNUH’s advanced data centre capability when it validated the hospital for Stage 6 of the Infrastructure Adoption Model last year.
