The need to provide more secure patient care through digital health records has increased rapidly in the wake of Covid-19. Healthcare providers across both the public and private sectors in Ireland are now looking to offer better value delivery to service users.
Engagement with Datascan’s GP medical correspondence scanning service rocketed throughout the pandemic due to staff constraints in practices. Surgeries found their team members were simply too busy to spend valuable time scanning and importing individual pieces of correspondence into the patient record.
“A single-handed GP practice can receive up to 500 individual pieces of medical correspondence every week and these all need to be scanned and indexed into their patient management package,” says Datascan Document Services CEO Orla Cafferty. “We offer a batch scan service which takes away all of this headache and helps keep patient information systems right up-todate.
“Some of the GP practices using this service can send up to 4,000pieces of correspondence per week and in certain instances, our batch scan service has completely freed up a full-time team member. This then enables that team member to work on more value added patient-centred tasks.”
Datascan Document Services CEO Orla Cafferty. Photo Chris Bellew | Fennell Photography
Adding value to GP practices
Built on a decade of experience working with Ireland’s main Patient Management Package providers, Datascan provides a particular niche within the GP market. “Typically, in the case of a GP, hospital consultant or clinic we are engaged at the point at which they are purchasing an electronic health record package to help them manage their patient information,” says Cafferty. “We digitise all of the medical professional’s legacy files and produce digital files in accordance with the protocols set out by the software provider.”
Datascan works with the software provider’s data import team to provide digitised images and import data. This means patient historical medical record data is sitting ready for the doctor to use within the new software environment. Due to consolidation in the patient software market, in recent times, Datascan is being asked to reformat patient data sets coming out of legacy systems and reindex them in readiness for import into a newer system.
“This is becoming more of a growth area for us as newer patient management packages are moving into a cloud-based environment,” says Cafferty. “Our technical team has many years of experience in indexing typical patient medical data, so we are a natural choice to assist practices and software providers when they are upgrading from one system to the next.”
Cyber Essentials accreditation
Based in a secure, purposebuilt facility in Finglas, Datascan Document Services has been operating as an outsourced medical records processing bureau since 2009. The 50-strong company is certified to ISO27001 standards for information security and has recently achieved the Cyber Essentials accreditation for its online processes.
“We are keen to expand our business in the medical data processing area through developing strategic partnerships with medical software providers, particularly those in the electronic health record space,” says Cafferty.
“We feel that there are going to be huge opportunities in the digital health care space over the coming years as both the public and private health services in Ireland seek to provide better, more secure patient care through digital health records.”
To find out more about Datascan Document Services >>> datascan.ie
