Abbottswood Medical Centre streamline their back office processes

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Abbottswood Medical Centre, Pershore, Worcester has managed and workflowed their patient documents using Docman for over ten years.

GPAbbottswood Medical Centre, one of the pilot sites for BackOffice Library, is now moving all its non-patient documents into the latest Docman module. The practice has 7 partners, serving 10,100 patients and uses the clinical system EMIS Web. Yvonne Merrick, Computer Administrator attended the first National Docman User Group in May, 2011.

“I first became aware of BackOffice Library at the National Docman User Group. The demonstration went down really well with the audience and I was really keen to find out more about the module and how we could benefit. For years we stored hundreds of non-patient documents locally on our shared drive, so we were keen to be one of the first practices to use Library. The surgery’s Practice Manager was also keen to move our non-patient documents to Docman to improve security and enable us to workflow them.”


“Using a shared folder to store non-patient documents was often time consuming to find, manage and maintain. Applying security levels, document version updates and sending them to staff was also difficult to manage. Docman BackOffice will enable our practice to improve business processes, save time and manage our documents efficiently and effectively in a secure system.”


The foundation module of BackOffice, called Library, enables practices to efficiently store, workflow and retrieve all non-patient documents to support the practice. Yvonne highlights “The new module looks great, is very easy to use like windows and is intuitive. We will be able to manage and workflow all non-patient documents and see who has read the document.”

Julie Moore, Practice Manager highlights “this will be particularly helpful as “evidence” for some parts of CQC registration, proof of staff receiving information and policies etc. At the moment we store non-patient documents such as:

  • Pathways
  • Protocols
  • Booklets and toolkits
  • Presentations
  • NICE guidelines
  • HR documents
  • Business minutes
  • Bills
  • Training guides
  • Price lists
  • Templates

The new module provides the facility for documents to be organised by categories, which helps you organise your documents into sensible groups. Practices can apply security automatically to any document placed into a specific category that has security applied to it. Documents can also be tagged which is a method of applying keywords to your documents. Tags are utilised when searching for documents and offer far more flexibility than using folders. Practices will be able to import their current folder structure directly into the new Library module from a shared folder or another source, whilst maintaining security access levels and structures.

Yvonne highlights, “As part of the process in moving to Library we are cleansing the documents we store. The categories section works similar to our folder structure in which we have imported into Library. The tags are useful to indentify certain document types and also locate a document that’s even linked to two tags such as Diabetes and Osteoporosis.”

If a member of staff updates a document, once the document is saved back to Library a note is made of the revision. Upon checking in the new revision the user can update and comment on the change, Yvonne highlights “You can also add notes to documents and save it by date so that a practice member looking for a document can read the notes summary before opening it.”

The Library module provides a content sensitive search tool to enable instant retrieval of documents rather than having to search through folders. The new module also provides the ability to store web links; Yvonne highlights “this will be very useful in providing website resource links such as to the practice website, patient leaflets, NICE guidelines or the PCT website.”

Being a Docman pilot site

Abbottswood Medical Centre is a pilot site for PCTI which enables them to use and review new features and modules to provide valuable feedback and improvement suggestions. Yvonne summaries “It was good to get a feel for the software and being a pilot site has gone well for us. We were able to input ideas into the development process, such as how we would like the tag structure to work and the development team at PCTI made the change.”

“The plan is to roll-out the clinical information into Library and ensure the Doctors are up-to-speed. We will then show the rest of the practice in the next practice meeting.”

Using Docman

“We also use the EDT module to receive patient letters from the hospital directly into Docman. This removes the need to handle the paper document and enables it to be accessed by the GPs even quicker. The next step for the practice is to implement the iWorkflow function which automates the workflow process. We will also review the new summarising module made to Intellisense.”

Hints and Tips when using Library

Within BackOffice Library press F7 to view the document details, F2 to check out for editing, F6 to workflow the document and ctrl + p to print. Hold Ctrl and Alt then type the letter K for more hot key options.