Three months of manual reporting, down to five minutes
I taught myself VBA, cut a reporting process from three months to five minutes, and shared the solution so our department could support record keeping audits across all professions, not just one.
An annual clinical audit report took one person three months, then two of us six weeks. It involved intensive manual collation of data and far too many tables in MS Word for my liking. I taught myself some VBA, switched it to Excel, and we were able to import the data and create all the reports we needed with a mouse click. Did I time it? You bet - from an empty folder and no data to all the completed reports saved on the network in less than five minutes.
As a result, the team could then support these audits across all professions, rather than just one.
Alongside some other automation work, it also led to my involvement refining and expanding a local data collection system for a national patient safety programme.