Southampton Uni. Hospital
Open Text Document Server, Alchemy Edition Transforms Occupational Health Records Management at Southampton University Hospital
Southampton University Hospital NHS Trust provides services for over 500,000 people living in Southampton and South West Hampshire.
Their Occupational Health department deals with the health, welfare and safety of over 7,000 staff, maintaining personnel, immunisation and clinical records, sickness absence and all accident/incident reports.
The Challenges
Occupational Health (OH) has to manage tens of thousands of records – both for current and past employees. Records have to be kept long after staff have left the Trust, sometimes up to 40 years!
Over time records storage became a particular issue. Records were stored in any available space often in boxes stacked 3 or 4 high, consuming valuable office and clinical space. Searching for files was often not practical and in the worst case could yield nothing other than frustration!
In 2007 the OH team’s problem was compounded as they had to move from their offices to a new, but smaller location on the hospital site. Whilst the new location offered better facilities there was no space available to accommodate the staff and a room full of files.
This was the catalyst for change that Jean Piernicki, Occupational Health Nurse Manager needed; “The perfect time to get rid of the ‘terminated’ employee files and modernise our processes in a new office.” Jean’s vision is of an almost completely paper-free environment. “I like change, if there is a better way of doing things, we’ll do it” said Jean.
The Solution
Jean found out about the successful implementation of the Open Text Document Server electronic document management system used by the Estates Department.
Electronically archiving the records using Document Server would eliminate the storage problem and provide fast easy access to the information directly to the desktop PC. Nursing staff would have more time to concentrate on their ‘frontline’ tasks within the department, not spend it looking for documents.
Document Server was installed and integrated with OPAS, the front office Occupational Health software written by Warwick Systems to provide OH records access and recording for 20 users – doctors, nursing and clerical staff within the department.
Over 25,000 ‘terminated’ paper records were scanned by an Avanquest partner creating a fully populated database within a secure Document Server data repository. Each record was indexed by family name, first name and date of birth.
Authorised users now have access to all documents in the repository via the OPAS interface by simply clicking on the Document Server icon within the application. The 25,000 ‘terminated’ paper files were then securely destroyed.
Once the ‘terminated’ records had all been dealt with, step two was the input of current ‘live’ employee paper records held in the department.
In line with Jean Piernicki’s aim for that ‘paperless office’, where possible all new documents are directly input via PCs in electronic format as they are generated, a task carried out in the OH general office by clerical staff. A scanning module facilitates the capture of paper records and documents are automatically routed to the relevant pre-set index fields – family name, first name and date-of-birth as per pas employee records, plus employee PIN, OPAS number and National Insurance number – to maintain the search criteria required for the document type.
The Benefits
“This is the first time any system we’ve installed has proved to be better that I was expecting, and my expectation was that it would be hugely beneficial anyway!” enthuses Jean Piernicki.
“We saw an opportunity to not only deal with a paper-storage problem, but by a comparatively small incremental systemspend, to transform working practices and greatly improve our efficiency.”
Efficiency – Nursing staff can get on with their core duties.
Space Saving – The paper mountain is eliminated for good.
Security – Highly sensitive information is now stored in secure data repositories.
Accuracy – High availability and no mis-filing.
Collaboration – Ability to share records/information with other Trusts.
Integration – Fully integrated with the OPAS Front Office Occupational Health system. Can be integrated with any OH Front Office system if required. Environmentally
Friendly – Questionnaires and correspondences that are electronically generated can be posted straight to the record rather than printed.
The Occupational Health Team’s workload has doubled since the move, but they are able to cope with no additional resource thanks to the document management processes in place.
We often take on staff who have previously worked for the Trust, so being able to access their old records from the past employee database is a real boon, saving us time unnecessarily duplicating information.
Jean
Now that the Document Server system has successfully been implemented, Avanquest are exploring other innovative ways to further improve business processes and service delivery.
More information
For information on any of our solutions or products, please call us on 01962 835053 or email sales@avanquest.co.uk.
