Ziekenhuis Netwerk Antwerpen (ZNA), the largest health institution in Belgium, has hired a new employee: Thibe. Thibe is a robot that reduces the administrative workload of ZNA’s staff by dozens of hours a week. Thibe is not a physical robot, but a software robot. Stig Dooms (ZNA): “Think of a virtual colleague who is able to mimic administrative actions in various software systems.”
The CoViD crisis accelerated teleconsultations – medical consultations remotely, by telephone or video. Of the 52 million medical consultations in Belgium in 2020, about 10 million were via teleconsultation – almost 20%. This considerably increased the administrative burden on ZNA’s support staff. Invoice processing for teleconsultations involves a lot of repetitive copy-paste work between different applications.
Stig Dooms, responsible for ICT business applications at ZNA, looked for and found a solution to automate this administrative process. He contacted robonext, an IT company from Edegem that specializes in UiPath, a technology known as Robotic Process Automation or RPA. RPA has been the fastest growing software segment in the world for several years now.
Joris Van Ostaeyen, co-founder and CSO of robonext: “RPA is a software technology that allows you to implement digital colleagues or software robots that are able to mimic a wide variety of administrative tasks. RPA is applicable to any combination of software applications, making it a fast and inexpensive technology to automate a process, without having to change the existing software infrastructure. This allowed us to teach Thibe to work with ZNA’s specific software applications in a short time. The entire project was completed within a few weeks. †
Stig Dooms: “Thanks to Thibe, we were able to fully automate this process in a short time and very smoothly. ZNA thus saves dozens of hours of administrative work per week. This pilot project proves the potential of this technology for ZNA. In addition, we see a huge number of possible applications for Thibe at ZNA: we are currently compiling our RPA roadmap for the coming years together with robonext.”
Discover the full article about Thibe in DataNews https://datanews.knack.be/ict/nieuws/ziekenhuisgroep-zna-zet-virtuele-robot-in-voor-administratieve-taken/article-news-1787237.html and Gazet Van Antwerpen https://www.gva.be/cnt/dmf20211007_93427214
Through this link you can find an interview with ZNA and robonext in FD Magazine: https://fdmagazine.be/tech/zelfs-tijdelijke-rpa-projecten-leveren-voldoende-efficientiewinst
