Whittington Health implements Docman Hub

Published: 10-Jun-2016

Solution sends letters instantly to GPs


Whittington Health has recently implemented Docman Hub and has sent 30,000 letters electronically though the system.

The trust is sending inpatient and outpatient letters and will next be sending A&E discharge summaries through Docman Hub. It will then be extending the Hub to send all letters through the hub to GPs.

The local health community uses 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 atWhittington Health, said: “Docman is cost-saving and time efficient.”

He added: “Before, departments physically produced letters and then these were sent to GP practices in the post, costing up to £1 per letter and taking days to arrive.

The initial challenge was sending inpatient letters from our inpatient wards and day treatment centre, where documents had always been printed out to send in the post to the GPs. We were able to interface 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 a letter to GPs as a first-class letter 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 also 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, and 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 one to two minutes.

Adhford said: “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.”

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