The SBUHB Pharmacy team wanted to explore whether technology, in the form of Robotic Process Automation (RPA), could be developed to clinically validate Homecare Medicines prescriptions to the same standard as our Clinical Pharmacists within the specialty of rheumatology.
The results showed that the 'BoT' or digital workforce member validated prescriptions approximately five times faster than the human pharmacist. It was not able to check 15% of the prescriptions, but this was mainly due to prescriber inputting errors.
This was a small scale proof of concept study in rheumatology but it may have relevance for other clinical pharmacy disciplines and redesigning the wider workforce. By using automated software to undertake high importance, low variance work, we can free up highly skilled humans to be on the front line in patient facing roles.
