After upgrading from the legacy solution, ScanAgent, the practice has been reaping the benefits of Docman for over one year. Recently involved with an EDT (electronic document transfer) pilot, the practice collects documents directly from Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and will soon collect from Ealing Hospital NHS Trust. Documents arrive from the hospitals into Docman Batch Manager; with attached meta-data identifying the patient name, hospital, date of birth and other relevant information which enables instant filing, removing up to 50 seconds of processing time per letter.
Hayley Goddard, Administrator, “We have been receiving a number of documents through from Imperial Hospitals in the last couple of months. The documents arrive straight into the batch manager screen so I don’t even need to scan them, which save’s me lots of scanning time.”
“For hard-copy letters received we use Intellisense at our practice to scan the documents using advanced OCR (optical character recognition) software to detect the information to file the document.”
Processing over 1,200 documents per month, the practice have ‘Intellisensed’ over 28,000 documents since they began using the solution and use Docman to store over 44,000 clinical documents and 90 non-clinical documents.
The pilot has received huge efficiency savings in the practice, allowing the staff to streamline their processes and drastically reduce the time they spend processing a document, which can be redeployed elsewhere in the practice.
“I am looking forward to other hospitals coming on board, so all documents come this way. We can also get emails and faxes sent straight into batch manager as well – something that should save us no end of time.”
The hospitals are currently sending discharge summaries electronically to the practice, but the EDT Hub can deliver all clinical correspondence to the practice including, A&E reports, discharge letters, encounter reports, radiology reports, outpatient clinic letters and out of hours reports.
“Because they come direct from the hospital, I also have the chance to reject them back to the hospital if they are not for a registered patient. This is really quick and simple to do, and I can also give a reason as to why I have rejected it.” This then allows the hospital to re-direct the letter to the correct surgery within faster timescales than ever before.
The pilot has now been closed and the practice has deemed it a success, proving to have created significant time efficiency savings.
A recent Docman Hub project in Sussex found that approximately two hours (throughout the day) of administrative time will be made available when all clinical correspondence from the Acute Trusts are sent electronically and are automatically matched with the patient record using Intellisense. This will equate to a saving of ten hours per week.