Responding to Healthcare Emergency Outbreak of COVID-19 Pandemic with Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Abstract

During the complex emergency of COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare sector experienced challenging pressure surge, related to rapid increase in the number of infections, patient inquiries, and demand of immediate treatment. Such situation, experienced also in Finland at the Welfare Division of Turku City, required quick decision making and fast implementation of a reliable and secure technological solution that can take some of administrative burden off the shoulders of nurses' personnel. The case presents the implementation of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technology that has already been recognized as an efficient tool at multiple business organizations, allowing to automate various commercial processes with quick returns and scalable results. The presented case discusses the drivers and outcomes of automating non-commercial, healthcare processes, as well as its impact on emergency response, operations, and society.

Employees’ attitudes towards implementing robotic process automation technology at service companies

“…Some authors attempt to investigate as many possible future, emerging, and disruptive technologies that could be used to mitigate the effects of the coronavirus. The IT sector's technologies were critical during the COVID-19 pandemic and will also play a vital role in the post-pandemic world, particularly those which can lessen the human workload, manage the company and ensure business continuity (Nadikattu, 2020, Kedziora & Smolander, 2022. Robotics, artificial intelligence, data analysis, cloud computing, and Virtual Reality are among the most frequently mentioned technologies (Bullock et al 2020;Kononiuk & Gudanowskaeds., 2021;Mbunge et.…”

Towards Sustainability of AI: A Systematic Review of Exisiting Life Cycle Assessment Approaches and Key Environmental Impact Parameters of Artificial Intelligence

“…RPA has direct impact on shaping organizational workforce and culture, from the perspective of personal development and re-skilling of employees, as their job profiles and work assignments transform into more creative, demanding, and at the same time, more challenging (Rajesh et al, 2018). Nonetheless, minor threats have been reported, mostly related to competitiveness at labor market and job replacements (Kedziora & Smolander, 2022). A survey on attitudes towards robots among European citizens found a drop in the positive approach, especially to robots assisting human workers (Gnambs & Appel, 2019).…”

Botsourcing, Roboshoring or Virtual Backoffice? Perspectives on Implementing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

“…It is related to releasing personnel from performing nonvalue adding tasks that are so manual, time-consuming and monotonous that the more humans execute such, the more frustration they start to feel and more errors they start to make. The implemented use cases have been reported mostly at the business areas of finance, accounting, customer service, procurement and human resources (Agostinelli et al, 2019), but also non-commercial settings of healthcare (Airola & Rasi), in response to COVID-19 pandemic (Kedziora & Smolander, 2022). The emergence of IA, understood as enhancement of RPA and AI, allowed intelligent 'software robots' or 'intelligent bots' to minic actions of humas and process even unstructured data with use of process mining, optical character recognition (OCR), natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning (ML) (Kedziora & Kiviranta, 2018).…”