The surgery changed their clinical system moving from EMIS LV to EMIS Web in May 2011. The practice receives 200 letters a day and utilises Docman to process them within 2 hours. Docman is used in the practice as their complete practice management system to save time for professionals and ensure data quality.
Before using Docman, processing letters would be time consuming.
The practice has saved time by using Intellisense to auto-file documents and utilise the intelligent workflow tools in Docman to quickly move the documents around the practice. These time savings are then distributed to other tasks in the practice.
Key Facts
- Used Docman and Intellisense since 2006
- 6 GPs
- 9,600 patients
Jenny Naden, IT System Administrator, “The practice receives approximately 200 letters each day which takes two people up to two hours to process and workflow. Before Docman this would take 5 staff all day to process and we would often have a back log, but because of Intellisense we can auto-file the documents and redeploy the time savings. This means we haven’t had a back log of documents for years now. As soon as letters are received in to the practice they are processed and are available electronically.”
“Because of Docman we now have no backlog of documents, no double entry of information or duplication of staff time, no mistakes and we do not waste time searching for documents. We have a very streamlined approach to our processes and are continually looking to making improvements to save time where we can. This could be a small change to a process using Intellisense to save a few seconds for each document and remove the possibility for error.”
“There are also benefits to the GPs who can quickly review letters in consultations, always have quick access to letters and can easily highlight on screen documents and workflow them to the relevant person to action.”
Receiving electronic documents
The practice has recently started to receive discharge summaries electronically through NHS Mail and will utilise EDT Connect to automatically pull the letters into Docman batch manager to be processed in the normal way. This removes the need to download the document from the email account, and the process to save and manually move them into Docman. This will enable the practice to remove the need to scan these documents and will save time to redeploy to tasks elsewhere.
Changing clinical system
“The time savings we have from using Docman have made such an impact that we couldn’t be without it. So we found Docman to be far superior and when we did a return on investment analysis, it showed that we couldn’t live without Docman because it is such an integrated part of our surgery.”
“All our staff use Docman heavily throughout the day. When moving to EMIS Web we were able to quickly use Docman when we switched over. We informed PCTI that we were changing GP system so that we would be prepared for Docman to be available to use as soon as the new clinical system was ready. This just delayed the scanning of the documents into the system, but once we were up and running with our new GP system we then scanned them all into Docman. Docman remained the same, familiar interface and the move wasn’t really that bad.”
Intellisense
The practice use Intellisense, the advanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine that automatically detects patient and filing details, to significantly improve the speed and data quality of filing into the patient’s clinical record. Jenny highlights “Intellisense is great, we would never go back and it has been fantastic because of the speed and ease of use. We would advise other practices to spend time occasionally to manage the templates if there are any changes that are needed, so that they really get the most out of the software.”
Back office processes
The practice store all their non-patient documents in the document store within Docman and soon will be utilising BackOffice Library. Jenny highlights “The GPs love the non-patient document store within Docman and it has become a key part of the practice’s records. We also heavily use the address book within Docman rather than having information on books and wasting time searching for details. The soon to be released BackOffice Apps will also be a good feature to move away from recording information in books.”
Making an impact
Pauline Kirk, Clinical Data Administrator “Many practices have visited us to see how we use Docman and we highly recommend Docman and PCTI to anyone. The support team are fantastic and the training we had when we deployed Docman was great.”
“The software has made a huge impact to our surgery and we haven’t had a sole scanning person for years, everything is done daily and we have the knowledge that Docman is the best product for electronic filing and clinical data harvesting. We used to have 5 people scanning and processing documents, now we just have 2 people doing this work for 2 hours each day. We have generated considerable time savings and consider our processes very efficient.”