Robot devel­oped in Oulu saves thou­sands of work hours at Covid vac­ci­na­tions

Robot­ics devel­oped by the City of Oulu boosts the vac­ci­na­tion process and saves thou­sands of work hours for nurs­es at coro­n­avirus vac­ci­na­tions.

Mass vac­ci­na­tions engage health­care pro­fes­sion­als every year. Each year cit­i­zens are vac­ci­nat­ed against influen­za, but the num­ber of coro­n­avirus vac­ci­na­tions this year is in a league of its own: approx­i­mate­ly 300,000 Covid shots are giv­en in Oulu this year.

A large num­ber of vac­ci­na­tions also requires a lot of staff resources. Before robot­ics was deployed, every vac­ci­na­tion event always required two health­care pro­fes­sion­als – now all it takes is one per­son.

– The deploy­ment of soft­ware robot­ics has reduced the num­ber of reg­is­ter­ing errors and saved a notable amount of time as well as per­son­nel resources, says Hilk­ka Haaranie­mi, ser­vice super­vi­sor of health­care ser­vices and one of the devel­op­ers of the robot.

Pre­vi­ous­ly, mass vac­ci­na­tions were con­duct­ed by teams of two nurs­es: one admin­is­tered the shot and the oth­er entered the vac­ci­na­tion data into the vac­ci­nat­ed person’s patient record. Now the robot does the reg­is­ter­ing. This change has freed both pro­fes­sion­als from rou­tine reg­is­ter­ing tasks to vac­ci­nat­ing cus­tomers.

The process of vac­ci­na­tion has become smoother over the spring. The vac­ci­nat­ed per­son is now reg­is­tered by read­ing the per­son­al data from the bar code of an ID card.

– Once the per­son­al data have been read, the appli­ca­tion com­mu­ni­cates if the per­son has already been vac­ci­nat­ed, when and with what. In oth­er words, the appli­ca­tion warns us not to vac­ci­nate the cus­tomer with anoth­er dose too soon, Haaranie­mi explains.

The bar code is used also to read the vaccine’s data, such as its mar­ket name, infor­ma­tion on which shoul­der it is inject­ed, and how many injec­tions the cus­tomer has had. The vaccine’s batch num­ber is entered into the app man­u­al­ly only when the batch num­ber changes.

First, the data are trans­ferred secure­ly to a pro­tect­ed data­base from which the soft­ware robot trans­fers them to the person’s patient record along with data about who injects the vac­cine. From the patient record, the vac­ci­na­tion data is trans­ferred to the customer’s per­son­al cit­i­zens’ health­care pages.

Soft­ware robot­ics were also used in the spring to book around 14,000 appoint­ments for a sec­ond vac­ci­na­tion.

The per­son­nel resources saved can be esti­mat­ed in the fol­low­ing way: as the work done by the robot saves at least two min­utes of work for every vac­ci­na­tion, the saved amount adds up to 5000 hours with 300,000 vac­ci­na­tions, equalling almost 700 work­days. Robot­ics can be utilised also in future mass vac­ci­na­tions, such as influen­za vac­ci­na­tions next autumn.

The soft­ware robot­ics solu­tion has been co-devel­oped by Oulun Digi, City of Oulu health­care ser­vices, and Q‑Factory.