Case studies

Overview: Customer Name Alexandra Hospital (Singapore) The Challenge Need for quick response to patients Slow retrieval of documents impedes customer service Tedious and time consuming of filing documents from the clinical laboratory Huge amount of storage space needed for documents from the clinical laboratory The Solution Canon's DR 6080 E-form (third party software) The Results Improved customer service through faster response to customer queries Canon's Dr 6080 scanning speed of 126 images per minute at 300 dpi helped to quickly archive the hardcopy service request form. Eliminated the manual filing and retrieval process of service request forms hence saving precious time and labor Reduced storage space of forms

"Our service had improved drastically as our staff is now able to respond very quickly to patients who make enquiries "   Lim Chieng Wei Medical Technologist Alexandra Hospital

Alexandra Hospital is a 400-bed hospital located in the West of Singapore. Nestled in a 110,000 sqm land, the hospital is a picture of tranquil setting, lined with mostly colonial style buildings built since the late 1930's. Originally built to serve the British Military just before World War II, it became one of the largest hospital in Singapore in the 1970's.

In the year 2000, a new management team restructured the hospital and improved the facilities and services. Then Minister of Health, Mr Lim Hng Kiang, termed the restructuring process as "very successful".

Alexandra Hospital is now an acute care general hospital with head-to-toe comprehensive services for the patients except in the areas of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.

Alexandra Hospital believes that their patients are the most important people in this hospital. They put the well being, interest and convenience of their patients before their own in everything that they do to offer the highest level of service.

The clinical laboratory department of Alexandra Hospital conducts various kinds of blood tests and analysis for patient. These tests are requested by doctors who would have to fill in the laboratory service request forms and thereafter submit them to the clinical laboratory where the tests are conducted. For audit purposes, these forms have to be kept for 2 years. As such, the staff will pack the forms into boxes categorized by date and store them in a 20-foot container situated next to the hospital, which is five minutes walk away. This container is rented by the hospital just for the storage of these documents. Everyday, there are about 500 forms sent into the clinical laboratory. These large amount of documents accumulate over the years and take up vast amounts of storage space.

When there is a need to find out if the patient is billed accurately, the staff needs to retrieve the service request forms from the container. Although this happens only a few times a week, it takes the staff 3 to 5 hours each time to retrieve the documents!

"The slow retrieval of the service request forms affects customer service. Also, I think it is very unproductive and time consuming for our staff to spend so much time searching for the documents," said Lim Chieng Wei, Medical Technologist of Alexandra Hospital.

In order to improve the level of customer service and increase their productivity, Alexandra Hospital decided to revamp the way they manage their service request forms. Pericom Imaging (S) Pte Ltd, an authorized distributor of Canon DR and CR scanners, recommended a perfect solution for Alexandra Hospital.

Using Canon's DR 6080, all the service request forms are scanned double-sided at 300 dpi at an amazing speed of 126 images per minute. These forms are then OCR (optical character recognize) and subsequently archived into an E-form, which enables easy retrieval of the forms by identification numbers or hospital registration numbers.

"The Canon DR6080 helped us archive our documents very quickly and with little supervision. It is also very reliable," said Lim.

Alexandra Hospital through Canon solutions has helped reaped the following benefits:

• Alexandra Hospital's staff can retrieve the service request forms within seconds instead of days, which dramatically improve customer service and productivity!
  
• Now that forms are retrieved from the staff desktop, productivity is further improved by eliminating the need for staffs to take a five minute walk to the container to file or retrieve the forms
• Since the scanned forms are securely stored in the software, they are shredded after scanning which eliminates storage space for the forms.
• iWDM allows multiple staff to simultaneously access the documents which improves work efficiency.
• The remaining documents in the container can be removed after two years to save on rental fee for the container.