How a Major Hospital Cut a Waiting List Form to 30 Seconds
A European teaching hospital with nearly 1,000 beds and more than 50 specialties could not afford to replace its ageing systems, so its IT team built electronic forms across them instead. Doctors now launch five forms from a button on their own screen, pre-filled with the patient's details.
30 sec
for a doctor to complete a Waiting List form and send it to admissions
2 min
for Theatre Notes, with the PDF in the repository before the patient reaches the ward
14
IT systems the forms now span, none of them replaced
50+
medical specialties across nearly 1,000 beds
- Sector
- Healthcare
- Organization
- A large European state-funded teaching hospital, thousands of staff, nearly 1,000 beds
- Constraint
- Ageing systems too expensive to replace, and fixed public funding
- Replaced
- Paper forms carried between the point of care and administration
- Built by
- A small in-house team trained on FlowForma, who know the hospital's processes
- Platform
- FlowForma Process Automation on the hospital's existing SharePoint
The pain points and the benefits
The Processes
- HR Processes
- Theatre Notes
- Waiting Lists
The Pain Points
- Excessive paper-based processes
- Legacy systems too expensive to change
- Inefficient use of clinician time
- Lack of buy-in on IT projects
The Benefits
- More efficient clinician focused processes
- Buy-in from healthcare teams
- Putting patient care at the center of processes
- Reduced paperwork
- Efficiencies enable management to do more with less
The Next Steps
- The hospital will continue to use FlowForma Process Automation to replace paper-based processes and advance the hospital’s digital transformation journey.
The Challenge
An iconic European healthcare institution, home to pioneering treatments and a progressive approach to patient care. With thousands of staff and nearly 1,000 beds, it’s on the frontline of services, providing emergency and acute care services across over 50 medical specialties.
Like many state-funded hospitals, the challenge is maintaining the highest standards of clinical care within financial constraints. For the IT team, the goal is to better enable ‘white coats’ – clinicians, nurses, doctors – and help them do their jobs more efficiently. A crucial part of this is replacing inefficient paper-based processes. Forms generated at the point of patient care in one part of the hospital need to be accessed by administration in another. Like any manual process there is the risk of errors or paper getting lost.
Passionate about digital transformation but restricted by funding, IT has to find ways to work around ageing IT systems that are too expensive to replace. FlowForma Process Automation was a perfect fit for what IT needed, a way to integrate new digital processes into legacy systems.
You have better outcomes when clinicians have access to digital data and are not running around looking for bits of paper to treat patients. That's our driver. In the next 10 years we'll be looking to digitize as much as we can.
The Solution
The IT team has found a way to digitize processes and improve patient care, by using the FlowForma Process Automation tool to span multiple IT systems. Sitting on the hospital’s Microsoft SharePoint platform – already used extensively by administrators and clinical staff – it has been instrumental in facilitating new ways of working.
FlowForma Process Automation has been all about ‘doing more with less’, using the no-code application to speed up processes without having to invest in complex system upgrades. A by-product of the new workflows is clinicians being able to access clinical data, in as close to real time as possible within the current architectural constraints.
No system or process gets approved without the adoption of users. In the past, IT staff would come up with an idea and develop something that wouldn’t get used. Now, a small team of FlowForma Process Automation trained staff who know the business intimately are responsible for digitizing the processes. The IT department hosts monthly meetings with healthcare teams and listens to their needs, returning a month later with an idea for a solution.
The business side of the hospital is also kept in the loop because processes have to span the front and back office, mirroring patient journeys. To date, numerous forms have been launched across 14 different IT systems, ranging from clinical flows at the point of patient contact to around 20 back office forms for HR.
| Flow | What it does |
|---|---|
| Waiting Lists | Provides patient referral details in advance of admission. The doctor fills it in and sends it to admissions in around 30 seconds — no more cards or paper trails — and a PDF summary sheet is stored digitally against the patient’s record. |
| Theatre Notes | Filled in by doctors immediately after surgery: surgeon, assistant and anaesthetist, the theatre used and the details of the operation. By the time the patient returns to the ward the nurses have everything they need. Typically around two minutes, with the PDF in the document repository. |
Both are among five form types a doctor can launch from an e-Form button on their own screen, and all of them open with fields already populated with the patient’s details, brought in from other systems.
We build systems based on what they tell us, not on what we think they need.
The Outcome
The hospital has taken significant steps on its mission to digitize processes that allow clinicians to focus more on patient care. The Head of IT has used the FlowForma Process Automation tool to simplify form-filling around recurring medical tasks, bringing a new efficiency that is widely appreciated by healthcare staff, particularly those on the frontline.
The electronic forms are easier for clinicians to fill out, freeing them up to spend more time with patients. The Head of IT praises FlowForma Process Automation for ease of use, for “simple interaction” and being “crisp and attractive” in its design. “It has to be a great user experience,” said the Head of IT.
FlowForma Process Automation’s no code development has given the hospital a more agile approach, traversing legacy systems and replacing manual processes in the service of patient care. “There is a huge amount of paper in every hospital and electronic processes won’t replace everything in the short term, but we’re chipping away at it,” said the Head of IT.
The Head of IT talks in terms of a 10-year digitization process of incremental improvement, not just replacement. “It’s been really positive and we’ve had lots of positive feedback from doctors,” said the Head of IT. “We know it’s something that’s used and will make a difference.”
You don't put new IT on top of a bad process; you want to improve the process at the same time.
Customer Feedback
Head of IT
A major European hospital
You have better outcomes when clinicians have access to digital data and are not running around looking for bits of paper to treat patients. That's our driver.
There is a huge amount of paper in every hospital and electronic processes won't replace everything in the short term, but we're chipping away at it.
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