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Mid Yorkshire
Hospital NHS Trust Increase Productivity &
Reduce Cost of their Document Management |
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Phase one
Mid Yorkshire Hospital
NHS Trust had a costly printing infrastructure.
The Patient Administration System (PAS) for Mid
Yorkshire runs on an IBM System i outputting to 1800
printers the majority of which were deskjets, they
also have some twinax and barcode printers. The
quality of print was low and formatting was impossible.
The incumbent print solution was server based, complex
to set up and required additional licenses to be
purchased for all laser printers. When SpaceTec
were brought in to provide InterForm400 it allowed
the NHS trust to use any PCL printer, eliminating
the necessity for high cost dedicated printers.
Mid Yorkshire used the Dell Printer division to
analyse all sites and come up with a design that
would allow them to significantly reduce their current
costs associated to printing, the design allowed
Mid Yorkshire to replace their 1,800 printers with
700 Dell Workgroup laser printers which are more
flexible (they could now print any document to any
printer) and less costly to maintain. These changes
alone lead to Mid Yorkshire achieving ROI.
Mid Yorkshire have two IBM System i the second one is
a backup system for disaster recovery and business
continuity. This machine runs in parallel at a separate
location, and mirrors the first in terms of operation
and applications. The old PAS solution didn’t
have a backup system in place, if Mid Yorkshire
had needed to rely on the backup machine they would
not have been able to use the print feature.
Document templates for forms, letters and labels
were run under an old application on the IBM System i.
Making changes to the templates requires re-coding
of the application. This re-coding can only be done
by the original supplier of the application making
changes expensive and time consuming.
InterForm400 is an IBM System i application that utilises
the IBM System i as a printer server, allowing you to
print to any printer in any location, eliminating
the need for additional print servers which saves
costs and increase the reliability of the solution.
Because InterForm400 sits on the IBM System i Mid Yorkshire
were able to mirror this easily to their backup
system. From a user level if a printer becomes un
operational there is no lengthy wait for it to be
fixed or replaced the print jobs can be re-queued
and sent to another printer.
Hans SolgaardHans Solgaard Head of IT for Mid Yorkshire
Hospital NHS trust said:
“When InterForm400 was introduced to me
I could see immediately that the product could solve
a lot of the problems I had been experiencing and
the additional modules would allow me to achieve
much more than I originally hoped we could. InterForm400
does exactly what it says it does with no complex
coding or hidden costs.”
Phase
two
One of Mid Yorkshires main requirements was to have
a scaleable solution. The budgets of an NHS hospital
do not allow for large initial investments so it
was important that the solution could be deployed
in stages. Phase two will consist of extending the
InterForm400 solution to reduce administration,
stationary and postal costs. InterForm400 allows
you to print any type of document from any printer
and merge these with data held on the IBM System i which
leads to any number of cost saving solutions.
Mid Yorkshire is spending a large amount of money
on pre-printed stationary. Different departments
and different consultants all required personalised
stationary. Any changes to these departments or
change of consultant requires a re-print. A costly
example of this is when the hospital changed name
from Dewsbury and District Hospital to Mid Yorkshire
Hospital NHS Trust and joined up with other hospitals
in the district.
Mid Yorkshire hospital sends out on average 100,000
letters a month leading to high postal and administration
costs. Where a patient falls under the cover of
two or more departments it would be quite normal
for them to receive separate letters from the hospital
on the same day, as there was no way to consolidate
these letters, each department handles its own administration.
The administration of the 100,000 letters alone
is a major task it involves a number of people sorting
the letters into first and second class delivery
dependant upon appointment dates, collecting and
enclosing additional relevant literature (advice
leaflets) and the folding of the letter and putting
it into the envelope.
InterForm400 has a number of additional modules
that extend its capabilities one of these is InterWord400
which is used by numerous clients as a replacement
for IBM’s no longer supported Office Vision.
InterWord400 offers the unique feature of merging
data from the host with document templates, created
in any PC word processor and creating output to
the host spool system in PCL. This will allow Mid
Yorkshire to automatically collate letters so individuals
will receive one envelope from the hospital containing
the letters from all the different departments.
Advice leaflets can be printed out together with
the letters removing the need for someone to collect
and insert these. The letters can be automatically
sorted into first and second class delivery so eliminating
the need for sorting by hand. Mid Yorkshire will
be able to save 3 pence per letter.
Because the print solution is flexible and the templates
can easily be changed, (in house, no need to pay
third party suppliers) Mid Yorkshire are hoping
that they will be able to utilise other services
within the Royal Mail that will allow then to save
even more money on their postal costs as they will
be able to fulfil the requirements of any specific
layout formats or even to add barcoding to the letters.
Solgaard says:
“ We can now respond to request for changes
to hospital documents immediately and ensure that
all documents are standardised across the hospital.
Some of the changes have been minor but have made
a major impact on the way the hospital staff work.
For example we are now able to add a persons religion
to the documentation used by the staff. This ensures
that we deal with the patient in the way that corresponds
to their religion and we are always aware of any
special requirements or needs.”
SpaceTec were given three days to get InterForm400
implemented and provide training to the IT team.
Users do not need training as they don’t see
any changes to the system they can however see the
changes to the finished documents.
Pat Race from SpaceTec said:
“ We were confident that we could meet
their deadline, however implementation also includes
the conversation of their original forms and documents
to the new templates to ensure we could do this
we downloaded copies of the spool files and worked
on the templates offsite. InterForm400 was installed
on the Friday and by the Monday Mid Yorkshire were
so confident they had removed their old servers
and software.”
Solgaard says:
“In my position I deal with many different
suppliers and have built some good relationships,
however I was very impressed with SpaceTec and the
way they dealt with a problem we had with a Dell
printer. SpaceTec arranged to have a duplicate printer
sent from Dell to the Developers of InterForm400
in Denmark for testing." Race of SpaceTec responds
“We were 100% certain that the problem didn’t
lie with the InterForm400 software, however there
was a problem and with the help of Dell we were
soon able to sort it out for Hans.”
Mid Yorkshire are looking at a number of other solutions
provided by SpaceTec. One potential solution is
to decrease the number of did not attend (DNA) appointments
which in turn will increase throughput of the hospital
and decrease re-bookings. SpaceTec provide an SMS
tool which could be used in conjunction with the
mobile phone details in a patient’s record
to send out a text message reminding them of appointment
times.
InterForm400 can also output to Zebra printers (ZPL).
Zebra have a range of products specifically designed
for hospital environments such as wrist band printers,
barcoding systems for patient notes, laboratory
specimens, blood transfusion bags and patient medicine
labelling. All created to make hospital administration
easier and more cost effective.
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