In this week’s blog we look at two innovative implementations of robotic process automation, one in primary care and one for hospital waiting lists; confront “survey fatigue’ for weary aged care providers; find out about when Australia’s sharing by default legislation is likely to come in; and we marvel at how access to the mighty Milo must be protected at all costs.

We had a couple of super stories on robotic process automation this week, one from New Zealand in the primary care sector, and one from Ireland in the acute care sector. RPA is not a new technology, but it has matured enough that it’s actually now being used quite widely in practice, and seems to be getting some pretty good results, particularly for taking away the administrative burden on clerical staff.

We took a look at what New Zealand primary health care organisation ProCare is doing with digital assistants. ProCare is one of the biggest PHOs in New Zealand with 170 general practices and it has now deployed five digital assistants that focus on clearing out a GPs in box using technology to perform a number of actions that would normally be manually processed.

At the moment, the digital assistants are just being deployed with practices using the Indici cloud-based PMS, but ProCare would like to roll it out further to help clutter the general practice inbox.

ProCare has designed these bots in a systematic way to ensure that they are clinically safe, and it’d be great to see it rolled out further across the country.

In Ireland, RPA is being used for wait list management using technology developed internally by HSE Technology and Transformation to replace the manual processing of waiting list data. The plan is to roll it out across the country for things like as end of day did not attend reporting, automated processing of SMS messages and automated booking of non-urgent appointments.

This sort of technology is going to become invaluable in future but like all automated processes in healthcare, it requires human oversight. It will be interesting to see the results.

Also this week, we heard from the Department of Health and Aged Care in its end of year round-up of the progress being made to digital transform the aged care sector. DoHAC has contracted consulting firm EY on a new project looking at digital maturity across the aged sector, not just in residential aged care but in home care as well.

The aim is to better understand and benchmark current digital maturity levels and whether aged care providers need help to improve their digital maturity. While worthy, we do question whether we are reinventing the wheel here. There have been quite a few studies in this area in the last few years, including one by the Aged Care Industry IT Council and others by the PHNs.

EY will launch a digital assessment survey for all aged care providers and the software community that will go out late in January, but it’s inevitable that this will face what aged care technology expert Anne Livingstone calls “survey fatigue”, where providers are bombarded with various surveys on multiple different aspects of the changes to the aged care industry, and you wonder if is going to turn up anything new.

It also points to the department’s over-reliance on consulting firms. We’ll have that story next week.

We also sat in on the Australian Digital Health Agency’s webinar this week explaining its request for information on new plans for the maintenance of the national digital health infrastructure. From that webinar, we learned that the government’s planned sharing by default legislation is likely to be introduced to Parliament this month.

It will be great to see if this legislation can get through before an election is held in order to get digital health information sharing going and not further held up by legislative argy bargy.

Speaking of elections, readers will remember our dire predictions of hell and damnation with Donald Trump being reelected as US president, and it seems our worst nightmares may come true. Trump says he will put Robert F Kennedy Jr forward as director of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Kennedy, a known vaccine sceptic with seriously weird views on a lot of things, has suggested he would gut the Food and Drug Administration and replace hundreds of employees at the National Institutes of Health. “FDA’s war on public health is about to end,” he wrote on Twitter in late October, adding that includes its “aggressive suppression” of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, sunshine, and other items, as Reuters reports.

And as the current FDA commissioner says, while experts often get things wrong, “Not having experts, I think historically, in every society, has been a case for demise of that society.” Quite.

On a lighter note, it started with $9000 worth of canapes at $32 a mouthful for a 300-head exclusive event for Health NZ staff, grew to $100,000 spent on catering at a conference for HNZ finance staff, of all people, and this week, it ended with a bang with a promise from the all powerful Health NZ Commissioner Lester Levy that despite the organisation’s dire straits and apparent need for massive cost cutting, this did not extend to removing Milo from the hands of a very thirsty workforce.

Rationalisation and budget cuts can sometimes go one step too far, and a cup of Milo is that Rubicon.

That brings us to our poll question for the week.

Do you think robotic process automation is providing real, measurable benefits in healthcare?

Vote here and leave your answers below.

Last week, we asked: Will AI regulation in healthcare be safe under the new Trump regime? That got a big no from our 83 per cent of our readers. Here’s what you said.