Case study: Document management

Combining electronic and paper-based systems improves Gloucestershire Hospitals facilities management

Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust’s Property and Medical Engineering Department provides estates and medical engineering services to some 160 properties, including two hospitals: the Gloucestershire Royal Hospital and Cheltenham General Hospital. Comprising a team of about 100 staff they operate from two offices based in each hospital.

Paper-based information was starting to cause a problem for the Operations and Maintenance department, which manages the maintenance of the buildings, including energy and utility services. While the Trust had adopted Microsoft SharePoint as the basis for sharing electronic documents, they were unable to capture paper-based documents into the system.

“Quarterly gas, water and electricity bills would have provided a mountain of paper alone,” explains Business Manager, Jennifer Alcock. “But the hospital’s utilities are billed monthly and we were simply running out of space.”

What’s more, the team handles 300 maintenance jobs on average each week and, for each, tradesmen are issued with a paper job card to record their time, details of the work and the customer’s sign off. These were stored for 15 years, for legal reasons, at three different sites, making it nearly impossible to locate one if needed.

The Trust needed to be able to store paper documents within Microsoft SharePoint and to retrieve and access them across the two sites, not only dealing with the immediate storage problem by archiving, but preventing it from recurring in the long term.

The paper-based information was incompatible with the Trust’s existing Microsoft SharePoint system. It also found that sharing paper information between two locations through interoffice mail and maintaining multiple files was inefficient.

Colman Herron, Information, Utilities and Energy Manager, began to investigate possible solutions and originally considered using stand-alone scanners but was concerned about their ability to connect to SharePoint.

The answer lay with eCopy ShareScan software, which allows the user to scan in a paper document, index it for easy retrieval, and using the eCopy Connector for Microsoft SharePoint, automatically store it by pressing a single ‘Scan to SharePoint’ button. It also allows users to scan directly to email and, within eCopy Desktop software, to combine paper and electronic files into a single electronic document.

Seven multifunction devices (MFDs), which combine a scanner and printer in one device, were installed across the four offices at the two sites, each with eCopy software.

Staff login to eCopy with a user name and password and — based on privileges pre-assigned in SharePoint — gain access to specified sites within SharePoint depending on their department and role. The same login also authenticates the user against Microsoft Exchange, providing the ability to scan and email paper documents from the MFD with the same characteristics of emailing from a computer desktop.

The new solution means it is possible to combine paper with electronic documents in one place. This has saved expenditure on standalone scanners and the service, maintenance and consumables costs associated with desktop printers. The team also has a far more spacious work area.

“We set up folders in SharePoint for different areas: waste management, water rates, leases and so on, and scanned in the existing papers using keywords and dates as reference,” said Jennifer Alcock. “Within two weeks we had emptied two enormous, floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets, freeing up valuable space.”

Now information is being shared instantly via SharePoint or by scanning to email: “You can travel between sites and access and print your documents wherever you are, and the MFD picks up the hospital email addresses from the network so you can even scan and email a document directly — instead of people having to collect documents or waiting for it in internal mail,” says Jennifer Alcock. “We will always need some paper-based documents but we are saving considerably on postage and fax charges.”