Rose Fells, Managing Partner, highlights why they chose Docman; “We discussed having Docman for a long time, but the key driver for going ahead was to have a comprehensive audit trail for documents, for the documents to be readily available to the practice as soon as they arrive and to generate time savings. We are now receiving hospitals letters electronically, so it was an obvious step to have these documents delivered into Docman.”
The old paper process
“Before using Docman, documents would arrive through the post, were opened and then date stamped before moving them to the correct Doctor’s folder. If a Doctor was on holiday then the documents would be passed to another Doctor and there was no real way of tracking these. The Doctors would then mark-up these paper documents and pass them back to the Admin team to scan. This meant there was no log of the documents, no way to view or know where to locate the letter or even to know if the letter had been received.”
The Docman process
“The practice receives up to 150 letters each day with the majority now being received electronically and pulled into Docman by EDT Connect. Using the attached meta-data, the document can be instantly filed to the correct place and workflowed electronically to the correct GP. As soon as the document reaches the practice it is available for everyone to access. This ensures that information can be passed back to the patient as soon as it’s received.”
“A single mouse-click from a patient’s clinical record enables instant access to up-to-date correspondence and results, even if documents are still in a Doctors’ workflow in-tray. Documents can be filtered by clinic date, organisation, department and consultant if desired and includes a full audit trail of each document.”
“Our GP’s annotate the letters on screen, add comments, or forward on within the workflow, complete with clear instructions on what actions are required next. This removes the manual process of searching through a paper file to locate the information and also removes the administrator’s preparation time. All of these functions are available using ‘1 click’ functionality. The document can also be sent to a colleague for an opinion and each letter provides a complete audit trail which shows the date arrived, index information, workflow route, actions and completion.”
“If the read codes are highlighted, the document then goes to the summarising team, who can also ask an opinion back to the Doctor if they need clarity on the correct code to use, which automatically sends the workflow back to the recipient to complete. All the actions are recorded and the summariser completes the workflow. We can also report on workflows that are not complete.”
Rose highlights, “The GPs seem to really like Docman, they do a couple of workflows in between appointments and have easy access to update on patient letters and as a result our processes are now faster and more secure.”
BackOffice
“We have used the BackOffice Library function in Docman to store information that we receive on email and then workflow them around the practice. I can easily drop a document in to Library, workflow it to staff and check who has read the document. We will be using Library as part of our documentation for storing policies and evidence, which will no doubt help towards the CQC requirements for our practice.”