Ashgrove Surgery, Pontypridd

Our passion is electronic document management.

Ready to start your Docman story?

The Surgery receives approximately 150 ‘hard copy’ documents each day and use Docman and Intellisense to save, streamlining working processes improving efficiencies to focus resources on patient care.

By improving processes, the practice annually receive an efficiency saving of £4,785 from the costs of filing documents, £7,200 in retrieving letters and £3,263 in improving the summarising process. The practice achieves total efficiency saving of £15,000 per year. These savings enable the practice to redeploy resources elsewhere.

Improving healthcare professionals working lives

The practice scan documents into Docman each morning using the add-on module Intellisense. This provides a fast and accurate document capture process, ensuring data quality. Intellisense scans the text of a document and extracts key information such as the date of birth, NHS/CHI number, forename and surname, matching this information with the patient register.

Filed documents enter into an intuitive electronic workflow, simplifying practice processes for a GP to review, highlight and comment before re-routing for a secretary to put into action. Documents can be accessed at any point in the practice to review a status, without the need to find a hard copy and then re-file the document after use.

Dr Tom Hodges-Hoyland highlights “We like Docman because when we move around rooms, we can have instant access to all our documents in a Workflow. With a paper based practice, documents could go missing and moving rooms wouldn’t be an option. However using Docman our lives are now easier and we spend a lot less time manually handling documents, whilst improving data quality and security”.

Docman provides a complete document management solution for all documents in the practice, allowing users to access documents faster and to perform their duties efficiently, without being held back from searching for documents. Tom highlights “We aim for Docman to be our complete content management system for all non –patient documents within the practice. We hope to progress and use Docman for other incoming non-patient documents including drug alerts and much more. This will enable us to retrieve any document quickly and easily, whether being a price list, leaflet or meeting minutes.”

Becoming paperless

Tom comments “We aim to further reduce paper in our practice with the aim to become paperless. Not only will we reduce errors of misplacing documents, but all documents can be viewed instantly, anywhere in the practice. We hope in the future we can receive electronic discharge summaries and Out-of-Hours reports directly into Docman, so letters can enter into a Workflow and be with GPs instantly.”