Archives for the 'Business Examples' Category
Document Management in the NHS
With the large volumes of documentation that the NHS handles on a daily basis, a document management system which offers the ability to organise this is going to be of great importance. As part of this process, the benefits that individual NHS Trusts can accrue from a programme of document scanning and indexing can also be immense, both in terms of time saving and efficiency.
These benefits were some of the points that Preview looked to highlight in their “Document Management Healthcheck” presentation at the ASSIST event (Association of Informatics Professionals in Health and Social Care) this month. It also gave the opportunity to highlight some of the work that Preview has been carrying out at a number of NHS Trusts such as Leeds Mental Health.
The issues that many of the Trusts are experiencing tend to fall into 3 main categories which primarily revolve around the issue of accessibility of the records they require on a day to day basis. These issues are often compounded by the fact that the Trusts run several different sites across their region with documents produced and stored locally but needed to be accessed by all of them.
The issues most commonly highlighted are:
i) The ability to both locate the information quickly coupled and access it as easily as possible. Due to multiple sites involved, this could often result in a time consuming search for specific documents.
ii) With document being in constant demand, real ease of access also required that more than one person should be able to work with the documents at a time, something that was certainly problematic with paper documents.
iii) The need to store a constantly increasing mountain of files and documents was putting more and more pressure on space which was already at a premium. More filing cabinets and archive boxes would only compound this further.
In each of these cases, the digitisation of the documents by scanning and indexing them, would effectively deal with these issues at one fell swoop giving instant access to the information to all authorised personnel across the region, not to mention freeing up some badly needed space.
But what happens if you need a document while they are all being scanned and indexed? No longer are they sitting in one of the filing cabinets waiting to be found, they’re in Preview’s facilities in London! No problem – with Preview’s Scan on Demand service coming to the rescue, any document required can be processed and put online to be viewed easily and quickly.
Bookmark to:
We’d like to hear your Views!
![](http://www.previewservices.co.uk/images/microphone2.jpg")
We have been running this Document Scanning blog for a while now and have primarily been using it to share information on what Preview Services has been doing, giving details on some of the solutions that we have been involved in with our customers as well as more general posts about some of the benefits that can be gained from document scanning.
What we would like to know is what you would like to read and see more of? Are you interested in ideas and advice on where document management could be of benefit to you and your company or how other companies have been using some of the solutions that we work with? Would more industry news be of interest or perhaps something totally different?
We’d appreciate your feedback, so please click here to use the comments box below and hopefully we will be able to incorporate your ideas here in the future.
Bookmark to:
Document Scanning for Leeds Mental Health Trust
At Preview, we deal with a lot of different types of organisations from international conglomerates to locally focused IFAs, and from IT companies, legal firms and many more besides. However, we also work with public organisations such as local goverment and local health authorities which suffer from the same types of issues and have the same requirements in terms of paperwork as anyone else.
Take Leeds Mental Health Trust as an example. They have an HR department on a par with any large other organisation generating documentation that needs to be organised and indexed in the same way that a private company does, perhaps even more so. They also have the added complexity of multiple locations, with documents being generated and often held in over 50 different locations across the Leeds metropolitan area.
Now, with the scanning of the documents and the records completed, there is much quicker access to the documents and relevant information using a central up to date resource. To achieve this, some 6,000 files were processed and 340,000 images were created which were then cross-indexed by employee name and NI number.
The new system has made it very easy to consolidate the records for one employee in a single file – thus ensuring that any given employee’s file is completely up to date. Another significant benefit of scanning the HR files is that it makes it much easier to comply with Home Office Reporting requirements as the required work permit records are now available instantly, as and when they are needed.
The system proved to be such as success that recently Leeds Mental Health Trust has also scanned and centralised all of their Leavers’ files, with Preview’s security vetted staff taking on the task of collecting, scanning and indexing these important records as well.
Bookmark to: