Kings College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust reports significant efficiency savings

Feb. 19, 2013 - PRLog -- Docman Referral Management System (RMS) has provided King’s with a complete electronic document management and workflow solution for managing all referral documentation from external and internal sources.
Following the complete roll-out of the system, the Trust is delighted to have streamlined the processing of referrals, resulting in referral to booking times within 24hours.

Steve Groves, Systems Manager, King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust “We have over 700,000 outpatient events each year and before an electronic process was implemented, we didn’t have an answer for how long it was taking us to process and triage referrals or what the outcome was. This created a number of problems for our staff and patient’s and we didn’t have robust data to report on this to the external organisations.”

“We can now report on the time it takes us from the point we receive the referral to when an appointment is booked. If the referral is urgent and an appointment must be made within 2 weeks, then we can process the referral within 24hours giving us a bigger window of up to 9 days to book the appointment in. From our analysis we can report on each department and the number of workflows they have. This enables us to see where problems might occur or where delays in referral to booking times might be happening. In result we can see what we are doing right so we can replicate the process elsewhere and also see exactly the pathways certain referrals are taking. This has enabled us to process workflows and book an appointment within hours, where before we would never know where the referral was in the organisation or if it had been processed at all. This limited us when we handled enquiries from practices and patients about the referral and it created a time consuming process for our teams to manage.”

“The benefit of a centralised administration team will help our organisation continue to deliver a good service when answering enquiries. Having access to all the information needed to respond to a query by using Docman RMS ensures that patients have the information they need and an excellent service is provided. This means that we are not passing phone calls around the Trust and require less specialised knowledge to answer queries; a member of the team will simply view the audit trail and have all the information they need. This provides an improved service to patients and improves the Trust’s reputation in the community .By going electronic around 1 hour a day has been saved for each of our 70 administrators.”

Ric Thompson, Managing Director, PCTI “We are delighted King’s have seen significant savings after implementing Docman RMS. There has been a real interest by Trusts across the country of what King’s have done and the impact it has made to their organisation. Managing paper referrals is an extremely time consuming activity, so by simply going electronic makes a real impact on professional’s daily tasks and ultimately the patient experience.”