Ankit Saraf on Automations, Vaccinations and Helping His Community

Naturally, I’m somebody who looks for opportunities to get involved with initiatives that impact my community. The culture of UiPath and our values of being humble, bold, fast, and immersed has been influential.”

Ankit Saraf, Director of Product Management, is a leader who embodies the values of UiPath and seamlessly applies our technology to problems that he comes across. In the two and a half years Ankit has been with the company, he has led by example and exudes compassion and empathy in his daily actions. The pandemic has been ugly, messy, and humbling in ways that are hard to articulate. Like so many of us, Ankit was eagerly waiting until he was eligible to receive his COVID-19 vaccine. In early March, he learned through a friend that OneStop Medical was giving out extra doses. “When I was getting my first dose, I learned through the person giving me the injection that everyone at this clinic was a volunteer. I asked if they needed more help and found out that they desperately needed help with data entry and copying data entry from physical forms and putting it into multiple systems. That is when my eyes lit up because that is essentially what I work on day in and day out and UiPath supports the usage of our products for NGOs and nonprofit organizations.” 

Ankit’s involvement with OneStop medical quickly progressed into a meaningful partnership. The Sunday after receiving his first shot, he met with the administrative director of the clinic. “I found out that it would take five minutes to register and five minutes to schedule a patient. Later, the clinic would spend ten minutes updating the information about that patient in their EMR system as well as the Department of Health website. It took about three or four hours, but we were able to completely automate their registration system, scheduling system, and automatically verify a patient’s insurance. They were surprised at the speed we could accomplish all of this.” Ankit kept meeting with OneStop Medical’s team to identify all their manual processes. Over the next four weeks, he automated the process of updating the Department of Health’s website as well as billing insurance providers in cases where insurance was available. Ankit set up the robots so the clinic could run them daily while they vaccinated between 150–200 patients.

OneStop Medical saved hundreds, if not thousands of hours of data entry from the automations Ankit created. With that time saved, the clinic could launch two mass vaccination days that saw roughly 1,100 patients from primarily underserved communities. “Everyone from the clinic was overloaded with the front-end work, directing people, checking them in, and making sure they have the right paperwork. I handled the back-end side of the clinic, which was capturing information on each patient, like who provided the vaccine, which arm was it administered, and reactions at the injection site. That information needed to be updated to their EMR system, the Department of Health website, and insurance systems. Since this had to be done for a thousand people, a different system had to be created.”

Ankit’s solution used teams of volunteers that took physical checklist forms and put that information into Excel sheets. Later, they ran automations from the Excel sheets to update all the necessary systems and close out the event. Ankit worked over 13-hour-days during the mass vaccination clinics, guaranteeing all the information and tasks were completed. Had Ankit or RPA not been involved, it would have taken multiple days and dozens of volunteers to complete that tedious work, volunteers that OneStop Medical didn’t have. Automation has radically changed how many people the clinic can help and the impact they can make on their community.

OneStop Medical is still doing daily vaccinations and is planning more mass vaccination days with the help of automated processes.

You can find opportunities to make a difference in areas you don’t think about. All kinds of resources are needed, whether that be time, technology, or data entry. Everyone should look at all opportunities to help your community in this hard time." 

You can also listen to Ankit’s story on YouTube, Google Podcast, Apple Podcast, and Spotify.  And if you're interested in a career at UiPath, take a look at our career page.