The Home Care Program in Panama helped more than 17,000 people with the power of Microsoft Power Automate

Fundación Unidos por Panamá, made up of Seguros SURA and initially supported by Banistmo, Celsia, Alimentos Cárnicos, Argos Cementos, and Pozuelo, emerged as a necessity in the face of the pandemic with the aim of designing, developing, and implementing the Home Care Program in Panama. The initiative involved an oxygen therapy treatment that uses a medical scheme supported by telemedicine, which referred to the "Home Health" Program implemented by Seguros SURA Colombia in Antioquia and other departments in Colombia.

This program provided timely care and follow-up to COVID-19 positive patients virtually and at home. The project focused on decreasing three fundamentals: hospitalization of positive patients, admission to intensive care units, and mortality, without neglecting the fundamental objective: the economic reactivation of the country by contributing to the control of the pandemic.

In August 2020, with the approval of the National Government of Panama and the support and coordination of the Ministry of Health of Panama, the Fundación began the operations of the Home Care Program in two districts of Panama City that had a high percentage of positive cases.

Then, based on the alliance with Movimiento Todo Panamá, an organization that brings together the private sector and contributed more than $2.4 million to the Program collected from the contribution of companies allied to the movement, it was possible to expand coverage on two occasions. The first was in September, where the care of COVID-19 positive patients was extended in three more districts, and in December, reaching five additional districts within the metropolitan region. In this way, the Home Care Program reached a total coverage of ten districts, which represents a scope of care for over 500,000 people.  During the eight months in which the program operated, from August 2020 to March 2021, it saw 17,000 patients, with only 3.55% requiring hospitalization, which translated into the release of beds in hospitals.

Given the constant increase in the number of patients affected by the coronavirus, and with the eye on a second wave that was coming at the end of 2020, technology was needed to be able to capture, structure, and process all the information from different Health Centers in order to provide a better service to those who were infected and to reach those who needed it most. Each patient involved processing between 400 and 500 pieces of information, and when it comes to COVID-19 treatment, time is the deciding factor.

Processing that took 16 hours per day

Until mid-December 2020, data processing was performed manually at various times and instances of the day. Patient information came from a variety of media, whether attached in emails, in the body of the message, as an Excel spreadsheet, or even in a text file. In turn, the format and content were not standardized, so the templates used varied constantly, making it difficult for analysts to do their jobs.

These reports that had to be submitted to health centers to track people with coronavirus consisted of ten emails per day, with five attached documents. These were: the patient's status, whether he or she continued in the program, or whether he or she had been hospitalized, the comorbidities he or she had, the patients who were already part of the program, and a last document with the names of those with whom they had not yet been able to reach. In addition, all oxygen therapies, prescriptions, and medications were also to be reported so that institutions could keep track of what each patient required.

This entire process took between 13 and 16 hours daily.

Technology as an enabler in the face of the pandemic

Jair Che Enseñat, Director of the Home Care Program, says that "the pilot project was planned to last three months, serving approximately 4,000 patients. However, due to the increase in cases, it was decided to continue it for five more months to continue dealing with the virus." In the second wave, Movimiento Todo Panamá provided the necessary economic resources and medical supplies to add eight more districts to the two in which the Program was already present, thus serving 35% of the city's districts. With this, the number of doctors grew from 30 to 70, which meant a greater amount of data to process. "We knew it would be very difficult for us to get the information that we needed to see the most patients every day," the director adds.

In this context and with this obvious need, the Home Care Program obtains the economic support of Movimiento Todo Panamá to find a technological solution that allows for the reduction of data processing time, thus not increasing the cost of the operation. In this way, the support of Microsoft partner Data Intelligenz was requested, where Abdiel Ramírez, Data Intelligenz Director explains that it was decided to address this challenge using robots with a rules engine within its structure for data management, including complex function management in Excel. "The idea was that the cross-messaging line was given by one single route that the robot obtained information in its different formats, channeled it, and processed it in order," he explains.

Bot-based process automation

Using Microsoft Power Automate Desktop, the service that extends existing bot-based process automation capabilities in Power Automate and enables automation of all repetitive desktop processes, the Home Care Program and Data Intelligenz created nine bots that interoperated with different technologies.

These bots were concatenated among themselves, which allowed them to structure the data for processing, identify the formats and correct them, create parallel tables and vectors to perform data matching activities, and clean and purify the data to be sent to the databases to generate reports. They could also run individual reports so that they could respond to adjustments and misalignments in information processing times by managers.

"Automation was a wonder. We didn't have to hire more analysts. The information arrived, it was extracted, ordered, and sent to the people who required it, and all automatically," says Che Enseñat. "Each patient required between 400 and 500 pieces of data. The project was completed with 17,000 patients seen and 8 million pieces of data processed. Without technology, it would have been very difficult.”

Better health care

In the operation of the Home Care Program, implementation of data processing technology was critical. Thanks to this, they were able to generate and share the information with the Health Authorities in a timely manner and better coordinate both the internal teams of the Program and allies of the home medical network. "Before, we had to wait for the daily reports to know where we should go," says Jair Che, Director of the Home Care Program. "With bots, it was possible to start working from the scheduled time without delaying the reports and thus reach more patients," he adds.

Using bots reduced daily processing time by 80%. "What used to take between 13 and 16 hours a day is now done in up to three hours automatically," Che emphasizes.

"Technology was a key factor that helped get the project done, and it certainly contributed to the success of the program. At the end of the day, this program was recognized by the Panamanian Ministry of Health for everything it contributed to the country."