A US health care firm built Document Management & Workflow Management System using Alfrescos

The Client

The client is a part of the federal and provincial government eHealth initiatives, dedicated to providing cost-effective solutions to the health system of British Columbia. The client provides better services to physician offices and health authorities, to make health care systems easy, fast and convenient.

The Challenge

The way how operations are carried out in Medinet involves a complex workflow that can lead to many operational inefficiencies.The patients’ records in a form of the voice dictation given by the doctor are uploaded to a server. These files are then downloaded by the transcription staff and converted back into word documents and uploaded back. The doctors then cross check the document for accuracy and approve the document. But, the current system was leading to the following problems:

• The lack of familiarity of the system led to lots of support tickets
• The system performance was severely going down with Gigabytes of data being added every year
• There was no efficient batch printing system in place which gave doctors the option to print the first page of every document
• For each document that the staff uploaded several entries had to be done manually in many places
• There were difficulties in tracking the versions of the documents and it was difficult to track and notify teams of the changes
• To put an enterprise system in place that not only is user-friendly, but is also productive, robust and adheres to compliance regulation like HIPPA.

The Solution

After evaluating many solution providers, the client decided to go with OSSCube to build a unified solution for the complete replacement of their existing system. While implementing the system, our team realized the fact that the users of the system were mainly the doctors who would not have a system with a high learning curve. So a solution based on Alfresco was decided to be developed that would be super simple to use. In addition, they could use everyday tools like Microsoft word to accomplish their critical tasks. The following were the benefits of the newly adopted system:

For  Doctors

• The doctors are able to access the repository using a familiar shared drive interface. The repository folders are then mapped to the desktop of each doctor. By this, they are able to access the files seamlessly without relying on the web based interface.
• Doctors are now able to initiate complex workflows from within Microsoft word only. They can reject a document, give comments for change and even modify the document.
• Doctors now receive automatic email notification if any document is updated or modified.
• Doctors can now search through gigabytes of documents in seconds that earlier took them hours.

For Operators

• Operators now fill the Meta data (doctor name, patient name, etc.) for each document as properties of Microsoft word document. They don’t have to login to the system and make an entry for each document they upload. Everything is done from within Microsoft word only. When the document is saved the system automatically extracts the Meta data from the word document and populates the database with the database.
• Automatic revision of each documents are maintained which make change tracking easier.
• The collaboration ability of the system has made the whole team more responsive and productive.

The Results

Medinet realized significant business transformation from its partnership with OSSCube—from the challenging requirement to improve existing business processes, productivity and efficient document strategy.  Ever since the robust, industry-leading system is put into production, the client's overall efficiency in document processing has increased by 30%. The support tickets have virtually decreased from an average to 200 per month to 30 per month. Another outcome is an exponential increase in the satisfaction of both customers and employees.