Our Lady's Hospital, Navan

Our Lady’s Hospital, Navan improve efficiency and turnaround with end-to-end clinical correspondence solution...

“The hospital has reported significant cost savings since going live with T-Pro Connect, which sends clinical correspondence electronically to GPs to provide a joined-up electronic process between care providers.”

Background

Our Lady's Hospital, Navan serves a local population of 184,135 in County Meath and a regional population of 400,000 (Meath, Louth, Cavan, Monaghan) providing general acute hospital services and regional elective Orthopaedic and Rheumatology services.

Traditionally, dictations were recorded by clinicians on tapes and then transferred to and from multiple locations across the hospital to medical secretaries. The correspondence was then typed up by the secretaries and printed out for approval by the clinician. The technology was antiquated, and the business processes surrounding it were equally so. The lack of visibility created significant challenges in ensuring appropriate turnaround times for letters and also in managing typing demand/capacity and workflow within the secretarial team. There was also a need to integrate the system with the hospital's PAS system.

Patient letters were sent by paper to GP practices, resulting in a time consuming and costly process. The hospital was spending too much time and money that could be better invested in providing care services to patients. 

“Our initial business case was based around the cost savings associated with removing the need to send paper. The manual process was inefficient and not in line with HIQA standards to drive forward quality improvements. Reliance on an external post created additional pressure on turnaround times and information was not received by GPs in a timely manner” a hospital spokesperson explained. 

“This has enhanced communications between the hospital and primary care”.

Solution

The T-Pro Dictate system is an integrated, versatile digital dictation and speech recognition workflow solution designed to provide clinicians, medical secretaries and managers with an intuitive, easy to use interface enabling them to easily create, track, transcribe and manage workloads centrally; as well as allowing them to leverage additional services such as outsourced transcription services and electronic distribution of clinical correspondence.

T-Pro handles all the stages in the hospital’s documentation process - from creation to distribution, and every step in between. The system is a central platform for managing dictation, staff productivity, turnaround processes, and report distribution - all while helping the hospital manage quality assurance and meet compliance.

• Using a smartphone or tablet, clinicians dictate directly from a pre-generated clinic list (pulled from PAS), meaning each dictation is automatically and correctly tagged per patient.
• The sound file is then routed securely to T-Pro’s server-side speech recognition.
• The resulting draft letter is returned to the relevant medical secretary who, on opening the file, is presented with the transcribed text within T-Pro’s web-based text editor.
• This editor has a feature set designed to maximise the efficiency of proofreading and editing; words are highlighted as the playback is controlled with the foot pedal and the auto-text function speeds up any required changes
• Changes made in the editor are sent back to the T-Pro servers for learning and improved accuracy over time.
• The automated demographic retrieval populates relevant address and GP details, ensuring document accuracy, and accelerating the transcription process.
• On completion of the editing stage, the work is submitted back to the clinician who can rapidly check and electronically sign/approve documents via web or mobile app.
• The final step then includes some intelligent routing and interfacing with Healthlink (national GP messaging broker), and subsequent electronic distribution of clinical correspondence to patients' GP.
• Real-time and historic reports and metrics provide management with a comprehensive overview of the documentation workflow, work levels, costs, and adherence to SLAs.

“We are delighted with the results T-Pro has delivered, and we have seen some very impressive improvements in the turnaround times for completed documents. The T-Pro platform has also given my team access to comparative quality, efficiency and cost statistics, allowing the hospital to take control of our transcription process.”

Ms Courtney
Hospital's Medical Secretary

Benefits

The hospital is benefiting from a highly flexible digital dictation, speech recognition and outsourced transcription workflow solution, one that has proven to boost staff productivity, improve turnaround time and deliver cost savings.

Clinicians are now able to manage dictations, prioritise their work, and access and report on patient information, all while using their preferred mobile devices. Within one year of operation, the time spent on transcription tasks reduced dramatically. The number of letters that secretaries are able to process per month has doubled and significant improvements in turnaround time have been felt across departments.

With T-Pro’s cloud-based SaaS licensing option for industry-leading digital dictation, documentation and speech recognition workflow management, there were no servers to buy, install, maintain or upgrade. The hospital has been able to reduce IT resource needs, automatically stays up-to-date on the latest software version, and give staff the ability to work anywhere, anytime.

The solution has also contributed to better workload allocation. “Before T-Pro, I had no way of seeing how many dictations were in the queues and couldn’t re-assign dictations to other secretaries”, added one of the hospital’s medical secretaries, Ms Courtney. 

The hospital has reported significant cost savings since going live with T-Pro Connect, which sends clinical correspondence electronically to GPs to provide a joined-up electronic process between care providers. Each month, the hospital sends over 2,000 documents to GPs through T-Pro, saving an estimated €2.40 for each patient letter sent electronically. Letters are instantly delivered to GPs meaning less staff time is spent on admin, postage is significantly reduced and a full audit trail allows each document to be tracked and reported on.

“Staff like the fact that when they’ve sent the patient documents, they can see via the audit trail that it has been delivered to the GP, which gives reassurance.”

Since the installation of T-Pro Connect, the hospital has been able to meet delivery targets such as the 24-hour discharge summary target. A hospital spokesperson added,

“GPs now receive discharge summaries within 24 hours which is extremely important from a clinical and patient perspective. T-Pro ensures confidential information is kept safe, removing the risk of documents being lost and provides patients with quality care.”

T-Pro has helped Our Lady’s Hospital, Navan becomes paper light and increases the speed of delivery of clinical documentation from the hospital to GP practices. Ms Courtney commented,

“The great benefit of using T-Pro is that it saves me a lot of time to do other tasks, it reduces paperwork and typing, and I can monitor the delivery of the documents via the T-Pro audit trail. It is also a much faster way to send clinical correspondence to GPs.”

In addition to rolling T-Pro Connect out across the whole hospital, Our Lady’s Hospital, Navan implemented T-Pro eClinic Manager to enable clinicians to treat patients remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic using video and telephone consultation. Ms Courtney added,

“T-Pro’s virtual clinic solution allows the hospital to deliver convenient telehealth that improves patient outcomes, becomes increasingly more efficient, and enhances patient and staff experience.”

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