Kendata archiving system cuts costs and saves space for
West Lothian Doctors' Co-operative
An archiving system from Southampton-based data-entry specialist
Kendata Peripherals has enabled West Lothian Doctors' Co-operative
(Westdoc) to make savings in its document storage costs, as
well as freeing up a substantial amount of space in its administration
department.
Providing out-of-hours coverage for 24 West Lothian general
practices, Westdoc receives around 41,000 telephone calls per
year, each of which is assigned a unique call number by the
co-operative's Knight Owl system. During each call, the Westdoc
receptionist takes the patient's details and a basic summary
of their symptoms.
This information is then printed out on a single-sided A4 call
sheet and passed to a Westdoc doctor, who speaks to the caller
and decides on the best course of action - whether it be telephone
advice, a visit to the Westdoc Primary Care Centre or a home
visit. When the patient has been dealt with, the doctor completes
the rest of the call sheet, detailing the action that was taken.
In common with other doctors' co-operatives, the problem for
Westdoc was that the completed call sheets had to be stored
indefinitely in case they needed to be referred to at a later
date for legal reasons.
Administration assistant Debbie Simpson takes up the story:
"After we had faxed the call sheets to the general practices,
the originals would be boxed up awaiting collection by a document
storage company. Although the storage company provided a good
service, this became an increasingly costly business as the
years went by and the number of call sheets in storage continued
to rise.
"Also, there would always be several large boxes of recent
call sheets cluttering up the relatively limited office space
that we have here."
Then, early in 2002, Westdoc made contact with Kendata Peripherals
and quickly realised the potential benefits of installing a
document archiving system.
"Although there was an initial outlay on the system, it
was obvious that it would save us a lot of money in the long
run," continued Debbie, "and you can't put a price
on the convenience and simplicity that the system offers."
Consisting of a PC, scanner, printer and Kendata's DCAM (Doctors'
Co-operatives Archiving Module) software, the system is based
on the company's commercial Information Archive Server product,
with specially developed input screens to suit the needs of
doctors' co-operatives. The result is an intuitive archiving
system providing features normally only found on significantly
higher priced products.
"One of the best things about the system is its simplicity,"
commented Debbie. "It only takes a few minutes to learn
how to use it, so staff don't need any formal training as such.
That is especially important for us because we have a lot of
different receptionists working on different shifts, and they
all need to be able to use it."
As batches of Westdoc call sheets are scanned, the system's
OCR (optical character recognition) facility automatically reads
the unique call number at the top of the sheet and allocates
it to the image, together with the time and date of scanning
- thereby simplifying the retrieval process.
Debbie Simpson again: "If we need to retrieve a call sheet,
we simply key in the call number and up comes a perfect image
of the original form, including any handwritten notes and drawings
that the doctor made at the time."
Since having the Kendata system installed, Westdoc no longer
puts the original call sheets into storage, but instead sends
them directly to the general practices.
"Nowadays we only need to store electronic images of the
call sheets, so we can forward the original documents to the
patients' GPs," said Debbie. "The DCAM system has
freed up a significant amount of space for us, as well as reducing
our long-term document storage costs."
- ends -
10th April 2003 Ref. KE196A
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