Sirenia: The Breaking Wave of RPA in Healthcare

Conventional wisdom says that the dramatic advances in robotics put the human counterparts on the path to a jobless future. Despite this epoch-defining declaration about automation, implementation of robotic process automation (RPA) has the key to unlock endless possibilities across diverse industries. In the throes of the technology revolution, the healthcare industry is ripe to grab the value opportunity presented by RPA. However, there is a major catch: taking advantage of RPA is easier said than done.

One of the primary challenges besetting healthcare organisations is managing and processing the information spread across various internal and external sources, like EHRs, lab information management systems (LIMS), third-party insurance portals, and administrative applications, among others. As most healthcare organisations rely on manually processing the information in those systems, it takes away valuable time that could otherwise have been dedicated to patient care. This is where healthcare tech experts came forth with the proposal of using RPA to tackle this setback. One of the leading-edge companies in agreement with this thought is Sirenia.

Founded in 2016, Sirenia’s core competencies lie in helping healthcare providers automate their repetitive, backbreaking, and mundane tasks through RPA and robotic desktop automation (RDA), thereby enhancing productivity and increasing ROI. The company’s solutions streamline back-office processes, eliminate paperwork, and reduce the amount of time taken to process medical records. “We are enabling healthcare organisations to deliver higher quality patient care faster,” says Freddy Lykke, CEO of Sirenia.

Laying the Groundwork, with Experience and Simplicity

Founded by Freddy Lykke, Jonathan Bunde-Pedersen and Martin Mogensen, the company drew on its’ founders’ rich experience in the healthcare solutions sector. The team noted that a clinician’s workflow involves working simultaneously with an EHR system, a picture archiving and communication system (PACS), and a LIMS. When a doctor selects a patient’s details in the EHR system and switches to the PACS, they need to fetch the information manually from the right patient every time. As a result, there is always a risk of selecting the wrong patient file, which in turn could lead to disastrous outcomes. “We are trying to evade such adverse turn of events through our context management solution,” says Lykke. “Sirenia provides RDA and context management for healthcare. Clinicians spend ample non-productive time handling disparate healthcare applications. The combination of RDA and context management offers the clinicians a significant efficiency improvement in their workplace.”

Sirenia’s context management solution ensures that the doctor is viewing the same patient’s information when shifting from one clinical application to another. Born with a singular focus to create better user experiences on the desktop, Sirenia empowers clients with a product that could handle both healthcare records management and note keeping. The team’s foray into the RPA sector was a natural progression to automate the complex and repetitive activities and couple them with brilliant UX that could augment day-to-day routine work on desktops. Sirenia offers solutions that are seamlessly integrated with the healthcare organisations applications and enhanced by its context management solutions so that clients can be assisted with fully automated workflows and user-initiated robots.

In its pursuit of better RDA solutions for healthcare, Sirenia quickly identified the most pressing challenge pertaining to EHR: managing time. The team saw from close quarters that before the advent/implementation of RDA, users would have to spend too much time and effort, keying in information into their EHR systems and other systems, the majority of which could have been automated. This then became Sirenia’s key area of attention—to automate all that repetitive, mundane work while providing a crisp, clean interface for users to interact with, simplifying the entire process. Sirenia realised what a significant help this would be to physicians as well, with their notes before and after a procedure. For medial secretaries, this presents a considerable boon; instead of retyping the same base structure of notes and administrative information repeatedly, they can get the software robots to handle that task and can then supplement with only what is unique for a specific patient.

Simplifying Innovation for a Specialist Sector

Sirenia’s view on RDA is one where the robots support the users. These robots are initiated by the users to assist them in a work process context, which supports their earlier point about the difference between RDA and RPA. Sirenia’s method helps establish the difference by assisting users to be much more efficient in what they do with their existing IT portfolio by optimising their operations with RDA, taking out the ache of menial repetition. The company’s prowess emanates from its ability to support users with the customisability of the solution and being very precise in supporting the users in exactly the right environment. With the utmost relevance and simplicity, Sirenia’s solutions ensure that users do not waste time in searching for or initiating a specific robot. To get the most relevant context for the situation that they are in, Sirenia embeds various features in its solution, including the ability to communicate effectively with users via a simple application layer placed on top of their existing applications.

With this augmentation of the existing applications, the users work processes can be combined and shortened so they only have to provide data once for a complete work process. Further information can then be collected by the robot to complete the task at hand. According to Sirenia, what its solution comes down to is usability and the ability to cater robots to the user in any specific situation. The company has a whole suite of techniques and solution options that can help achieve that usability to present only those functionalities to the user, which are most relatable. The collaboration between the user and the technology on the desktop, along with its context manager, provides the prime solution for the ideal desktop experience.

"We are enabling healthcare organisations to deliver higher quality patient care faster"

An Instance of Effectiveness

Sirenia provides a range of other RPA and RDA solutions. Illustrating the company’s capabilities, Lykke mentions how Odense University Hospital turned to Sirenia to implement an RDA solution to automate the patient medical data documentation tasks, freeing up time for clinicians to focus more on providing care. At the hospital’s ENT department, clinicians recorded patient information on paper documents or dictated notes on tape, which had to be transcribed and entered into the electronic medical record (EMR) system. The hospital soon realised that this manual process was time-consuming and had to be replaced. As a result, they turned to Sirenia to deploy an RDA solution that automated the task of updating the medical record of patients along with administrative details and accounting information. Making use of this solution, doctors saved ample time and provided smarter, safer, and efficient treatment. And at the same time, the medical record is updated as soon as the patient leaves the room.

Full Steam Ahead to Expand

Today, Sirenia focuses primarily on healthcare, besides other domains including accounting, property administration, and insurance. The company is heavily engaged in RPA with its differentiator definitely in the way they work with RDA, supporting users on the desktop. Expanding its partner network, Sirenia has aggressive plans to grow internationally. In terms of growth, Sirenia’s goal is to find more partners and get into other markets, such as in Europe and the Middle East. “Improving clinicians’ performance by automating manual, error-prone tasks has always been our prime focus,” asserts Lykke. Along with that, Sirenia also provides a range of services related to automation, such as training healthcare professionals to use RPA solutions. These innovative RPA solutions and services enjoy high acclaim by many prestigious healthcare conventions. For instance, recently Sirenia won the award for the most innovative solution at the yearly eHealth conference in Denmark. However, today, besides the healthcare domain, the company is also gaining eminence in other industries, such as financial accounting, property administration, and insurance. Simplicity continues to be key for the company, which takes its combined team expertise in the healthcare area to direct it toward all sectors that could benefit from the cutting-edge robotic automation.