Docman has had another exciting year supporting over 6,000 practices and 100 NHS Trusts to deliver paper free care.
Highlights of 2013 included celebrating the 6,000th Docman GP practice, launching a new customer testimonial website; www.lovedocman.com and Greater Manchester extending their Docman Hub project by a further four Trusts to cover 500 GP Practices.
Docman also helped King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust to achieve significant efficiency savings utilising Docman RMS, moving them closer to their paperless goal.
Ric Thompson, Managing Director, Docman “It has been another great year for Docman and the 6,000 NHS organisations that we support. We’ve engaged with over individual 2,000 customers across 100 local user groups helping organisations to drive efficiencies. I see our ‘closeness’ to our customers as unique makeup of our company DNA!”
“Our Docman Hub solution is continuing to facilitate greater interoperability for over 100 NHS Trusts and Docman RMS is enabling a growing number of Trusts to digitise and streamline their enterprise referral process”
“This year we won the National Innovator of the Year Award and have also been recognised in a number of awards including the HSJ Efficiency Awards, EHI Awards and the General Practice Awards.”
“In 2014 we will continue to strive to provide the NHS with cost effective and innovative solutions to join up healthcare.”
The year in summary is provided below:
January
On 17th January Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt detailed his plans for the NHS to share digital data from April 2014 and to adopt paperless referrals from April 2015.
The announcement highlighted the progress made by King’s College Hospital Foundation Trust to become fully paperless. A key part of the Trust’s paperless strategy has been the implementation of Docman RMS to provide a fully electronic referral management and workflow solution.
February
NHS Tayside reported sending over 150,000 electronic documents through their Docman Hub each month. Lesley McLay Chief Operating Officer, NHS Tayside, said “We are now recognising many of the benefits attributed to putting EDT in practice such as improved patient safety, improved patient information quality and cost savings. NHS Tayside is now processing over 150,000 documents a month within 8 document sources ranging from the Out of Hours Episodes, Immediate Discharge Letters and Lab Results.”
Ash Trees Surgery reported time savings of seven hours per day using Docman GP. Lisa Jones, Data Team Leader “we did a time analysis into the impact of iWorkflow in comparison to Docman’s previous workflow module and the time savings found were considerable. We have saved each of our staff around 1 hour a day because of the automated workflow processes we have set-up across our practice.”
In February we reported that over 1,000 practices were using Docman GP with EMIS Web, there are now over 2,000 Docman practices using EMIS Web. Throughout the year Docman has successfully migrated hundreds of Docman practices to EMIS Web. Ric Thompson, Managing Director, Docman “We have been delighted with the feedback from new and existing users of Docman that have moved to EMIS Web and we’re pleased to support practices during this time of change.”
March
In March Docman celebrated the 6,000th practice to adopt Docman GP to streamline processes and significantly reduce paper in practice. Caroline Lee, Managing Partner, Norwood Medical Centre “A local practice recommended Docman to us about a year ago, since then we have heard so much about Docman across Cumbria so we can’t wait to get the system up and running.”
Docman was invited to exhibit at Europe’s largest Healthcare Innovation conference which was held at ExCel London. Over 10,000 delegates were in attendance at the two day conference where Docman demonstrated their leadership in healthcare software innovation.
April
April also marked the launch of a new user interface providing practices with a new streamlined and configurable home page, enhanced summarising tools and additions to its BackOffice management system. Jackie Holyoake, IT Manager, Poplar Grove Practice “Our users like the new layout, they find it easier to navigate and like the fact they can customise it to suit them. The whole product is much easier on the eye making the software a fast and fluid experience.
Camden & Islington NHS Foundation Trust implemented Docman Hub to transfer patient letters electronically to GP practices. Docman Hub is utilised with RiO to send patient letters electronically to practices. Ali Perry, Business Transformation and Project Manager “We aimed to streamline the process for how we communicate with GPs. There was no formal method across our organisation for sending information to GPs so one solution to transfer everything was ideal.”
After an overwhelming response to the Docman Superhero competition, the winner of our competition to design Docman was announced and a new website was launched based on the winning design. www.lovedocman.com is used to share customer testimonials and showcase Docman Superhero’s driving efficiencies and improvements.
May
The annual National Docman User Conference was once again held at the Institute of Directors, Pall Mall. Over 300 delegates from primary, secondary and social healthcare organisations attended the conference which included presentations from King’s College Hospitals NHS FT, Central Surrey Health and University Hospitals Birmingham NHS FT.
June
Docman won the National Innovator of the Year award at a prestigious award ceremony with over 1,100 attendees from the healthcare sector. The award recognises the innovation behind Docman’s solutions to support organisations deliver connected, joined-up care, underpinned by driving a paperless healthcare.
Docman was also recognised in the HSJ Efficiency Awards for the work with King’s College Hospital NHS FT.
The Guardian published a review on King’s College Hospital by Colin Sweeney, Director of IT. The news article discussed the innovations being used to revolutionise the way information is used at the hospital, including Docman RMS. To read the full review click here.
Chilwell Meadows Surgery maximised efficiencies with iWorkflow and utilised Intellisense clinical content recognition to save up to one minute per document. Ed Longridge, Quality Development and Information Systems Manager “Intellisense saves quite some time in terms of not having to look for the correct patient or department for example. We estimate that Intellisense saves 30 seconds to a minute per document and with 650 letters a week this soon adds up!”
Tracy Keogh, Practice Manager at Farley Road Medical Practice discussed streamlining processes with Docman GP, “Docman has streamlined the whole practice, enabling us to save time that can be redeployed on other tasks. Docman works really well for our practice, we all can instantly view documents and notice problems straight away. The information is up to date and is a very quick process when receiving letters electronically.”
July
Greater Manchester extended their electronic clinical document exchange platform to include 4 additional Docman Hubs;
- Greater Manchester West Mental Health Trust
- Pennine Care Mental Health Trust
- Manchester Mental Health Trust
- Bridgewater Community Health
The initial project consisted of 10 EDT Hubs across 10 NHS Trusts to deliver 5 million patient letters electronically per annum to 500 GP practices, driving significant efficiencies and clinical benefits across the region.
Docman was recognised in the EHI Awards for delivering patient correspondence electronically to GPs. Sending over 150,000 documents electronically each month, Docman Hub was shortlisted in the Best Use of IT to Support Healthcare Business Efficiency category with NHS Tayside.
Docman held over 100 user groups reaching over 2000 users in 2013. In July, a Docman Roadshow in Croydon attracted over 30 delegates who shared best practice and learned about the latest time saving features of Docman GP. Geraldine Anscombe commented “One experienced manager told me that she had learnt three new things which she was going to implement in her practice. There was plenty of discussion with everyone sharing ideas and ways of working. We’re planning on organising more events in the future around the Surrey and Sussex area.”
August
St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospital NHS Trust implemented Docman Hub to transfer patient letters electronically to 78 practices. Neil Darvill, Director of Informatics at the Trust explains “The aim of the project was to automate the process of sending documents to practices and to transfer information in a speedy way. Before Docman we had a mixed economy of how practices managed paper in their practice, but with Docman the process is now consistent and streamlined.”
Docman held a local user group for Cumbria practices to help in their quest to become paper free. Louise Bacon, Lowther Medical Centre “I found the user group extremely useful and I learned lots from Docman and the other practices that were in attendance. It was a great forum for sharing best practice and discussing health IT developments across the Cumbria area. We all agreed that we need to do more events like this and have suggested to Docman that we could use webinars to continue the dialogue.”
September
King’s College Hospital implemented Docman Hub to electronically send clinical correspondence to practices in the London Borough of Southwark. Clive Stringer, Deputy Head of ICT “ITK compliance is important to King’s because we have over 50 interfaces with clinical systems, both inside the Trust and in the wider health economy. In the past all these have been bespoke interfaces which increase cost and deployment timescales. We want to move to a situation where we can implement standard interfaces at lower costs and with more speed.”
Jabeen Meghji, Practice Manager at The Family Practice, based at Barbara Castle Way Health Centre discussed audited practice management with BackOffice Apps. “Before using the BackOffice Apps we would manually record information on paper, but the problem with paper is that it can go missing. Everything can be recorded electronically in the Apps so that we have a full history of information so we can easily find out what happened on a certain date and what the outcome was. We can easily see when the information was added to an App, who was looking at it, where it is in the process and when it was recorded as finished. For example this could be a patient complaint; we record all the information in the App, so we can then always have an audit of information rather than worrying about paper records.”
Docman hosted a range of free webinars to further enhance user knowledge and experience of the time saving Docman modules. The series of webinars attracted representation from over 500 practices and included;
- Intellisense filing and maintenance
- Intellisense Read Coding
- BackOffice Apps
- BackOffice Library
- Differences with workflow and iWorkflow, how to deal with Workflow and iWorkflow Maintenance
October
The Isle of Wight NHS Trust progressed on their paperless journey, sending discharge summaries and A&E letters electronically through Docman’s clinical correspondence Hub to 17 practices on the island. Barbara Gove, IM&T Project Manager, Isle of Wight NHS Trust says: “we previously sent discharge summaries and A&E letters by email or post which was a clunky and manual process. Now in the EPR the document is created and a Doctor clicks the complete button and the letter is sent to the GP practice and delivered into Docman GP when the practice schedules to do so. This ensures we deliver these letters to GP practices in an efficient and timely manner.”
November
Docman was recognised in the General Practice Awards for delivering to 6,000 GP Practices.
Daniel Alexander from Greater Manchester CSU delivered a presentation at EHI Live 2013 based on the clinical correspondence project currently taking place. Daniel Alexander, Project Manager, GMCSU “It has been a real pleasure in working as part of the GM ECC programme and it is something that I am and will be really proud of once every document type from the myriad of Acute systems are being sent electronically using Docman Hubs. In 2010 we rolled out Docman Hub to enable practices in Salford to receive clinical correspondence electronically from the Salford Royal Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. This successful piece of work is now part of the GM ECC deployment across 14 Trusts and 500 GP practices; it will create huge benefits for the region across primary and secondary care.”
December
Docman launched a competition to find the most creative Docman Superhero Character photo. The competition, which instantly received an overwhelming response, asked customers to request their free Docman Bobblehead and take a creative photo for the chance to win an iPad Mini.
Wendy Goodchild from Catshill Village Surgery created 40% additional time savings with Docman GP. “Actions which would have previously used 7 or 8 mouse clicks can now be performed in less than 3. I estimate that we have created an additional 40% in time savings through using iWorkflow.”
“iWorkflow has specifically helped us in the way we manage our Diabetic Clinic letters. Using the Quick Steps, our Doctors can use one mouse click to return the letters to staff to add information for QOF.”