Southampton City Council
AchieveForms, a browser based forms package from Business Web Software, transformed 25 paper forms into just one electronic form for easy off-line use by Social Carers at Southampton City Council.
Southampton City Council actively provides care for 8,000 of their 217,000 residents at any one time. The Council's Health and Social Care department needs to function smoothly and react as quickly as possible. AchieveForms has been helping Southampton City Council improve its service provision by streamlining the management of vital medical forms.
Business Need
Mobile health care workers, such as Occupational Therapists, help residents that are elderly or infirm live safely, healthily and independently. The Council realised the need to reduce the volume of paper-based processes and move towards a real-time data capture process so that the administration of the patient's care could be accelerated.
Old Process
The main problem of this process was the length of time from when the data was captured onto paper until it was entered into the PARIS system at the office.
Several aspects were identified where data delivery needed to be speeded up, sensitive information needed to be more secure and medical information needed to be accurate and shared with other health services.
Solution
The logical solution to most paper processes is the introduction of electronic methods. In the case of Social Carers, who need to be mobile, it posed an obstacle because they had to be offline when seeing patients. The solution was to implement forms software capable of being used online and offline with a minimal loss of functionality. Data is entered once, rather than being written out and re-keyed. The developers were familiar with the use of AchieveForms in other areas, so they were confident that it could be used well in this pilot. To date there have been no changes to the new process.
Offline development on the project began 6 months ago, when the IT department started to transfer paper forms into AchieveForms. Although some paper-based health assessments are necessary, they are achieving their goal of 30% of forms being completed using the Offline Client.
New Process
AchieveForms offers form functionality that is intuitive to the users and requires little or no training - the offline functionality offers a robust datacapture solution which isn't compromised by drops in network coverage.
"Care professionals can capture assessment information in a flexible working environment and save valuable time previously lost to the double-entry of assessment information. We now operate on an improved security environment whereby assessment information is held electronically and securely on an encrypted laptop as opposed to paper."
-- Saqib Yasin, Policy Development Manager (Performance and Projects), Southampton City Council.
The Results
On average there are 40 assessments per week. The old process required an hour per health assessment and then an additional 40 minutes inputting the data back at the office. The new system eliminates the additional inputting - saving up to 26.6 hours a week.
A major result was one eForm replacing 25 paper based forms, leading to a direct cost saving benefit, not to mention the time saving element.
AchieveForms Offline still gave the full features and benefits of AchieveForms, including validated data capture, conditionals and auto-field completion.
Another big win for the new process was that users are happy to use the eForms. This was because AchieveForms mirrored the paper form, in terms of look and flow.
Other results included the speeding up of the referral procedure; health and social care referrals could be passed to the relevant team/services much more quickly, i.e., the completed AchieveForms form can be automatically emailed as a PDF to the appropriate Carer.
Although this process is executed on notebooks/laptops (due to the volume of information being captured), PDAs are being considered in other areas. The Council are looking to introduce AchieveForms' Online/Wireless functionality for hospital discharge forms - which would allow basic information to be captured wirelessly from a patient's bedside.
More Information
Further information on this project can be found in the following presentation:
Southampton Mobile Working (PowerPoint)
