The Trust is sending Inpatient and Outpatient letters and will next be sending A&E discharge summaries through Docman Hub. The Trust will then be extending the Hub to send all letters through to GPs.
The local health community use Docman GP to manage the correspondence they receive and the Hub means they can receive this information electronically into the centre of their working process. The letters are received with meta-data, containing information to pre-populate the fields to file a document and in result realise greater time savings.
David Ashford, IT Project Manager, at Whittington Health which incorporates The Whittington Hospital and provides community services throughout Haringey and Islington in North London, said “Docman is cost-saving and time efficient.”
David explained the prolonged process of sending critical documents through a paper process:
“Departments physically produced letters and then these were sent to GP practices in the post costing up to £1 per letter, taking days to arrive.
The initial challenge was sending letters from our inpatient wards and Day Treatment Centre, as documents had always been printed out to send in the post to the GPs. We were able to connect our clinical messaging systems with Docman Hub to enable these letters to end up at the relevant GP surgery instantly.
We budgeted the cost of sending a letter first class to GPs and the overall cost was up to a £1. The time cost could mean a letter could take a couple of days. The win with Docman Hub is that it meets our CQUIN target with the letter arriving instantly and well within the 24-hour window.
The meta-data sent with a letter helps GP practices to cut down data quality issues and helps with filing a letter. The time taken to print and post high volumes of letters is a considerable administrative burden, which Docman Hub helps to reduce. It also eliminates the need for GP practices to deal with opening and scanning, and manually organising the letters. To create and post a single letter could mean a time cost of 1 to 2 minutes to us so these numbers really add up.
Ultimately the benefits will create cost savings and mean we can get information to GPs in our desired timescales. It also means good information governance, where if a letter is bounced back to us it can be immediately managed electronically so we can process these quickly and efficiently.”