Crescendo Case Study: The Dunstan Partnership

The Dunstan Partnership is a busy practice located in the ‘state of the art’ purpose built Breightmet Health Centre. The practice is committed to providing quality of service to their patients whilst maintaining the human touch and building long term relationships

As part of their drive to improve patient care and service, the practice have been looking for ways of improving efficiencies and making better use of the resources they have available.

One area that the practice identified as in need of attention was that of referral management. The old traditional method of recording referral letters on micro cassettes and then passing these to secretaries to transcribe was becoming increasingly difficult, due to the expansion of the practice. Delays occurred throughout the process from the doctors dictating multiple referrals on tapes, to the time the tapes were actually delivered to the secretary, as well as delays caused by re-listening to the recordings because the sound reproduction was so poor. It was also difficult to identify urgent or priority work which was often half way through a tape without having to play the tape through first. Finally, the tape system was unreliable and, not being a digital system, new parts were difficult to source and expensive to buy. There was no easy visibility of the amount of outstanding work within the process without performing laborious audits, and, on occasions, tapes would break or fail to record and doctors would be forced to waste valuable time re-dictating the lost work. It was not that anyone was doing anything wrong, it was just the way the process worked.

Having seen a demonstration of the Crescendo Solution at the ISOFT Conference, a practice demonstration was arranged and the Partnership could immediately see that the solution would meet all their requirements and more. ‘The digital dictation has streamlined the way in which the dictation is done and increased the speed in which referrals are completed by about 30%-40%’ said Vicky Bourn, Deputy Practice Manager/IT Manager and continued ‘The Staff would not be without it and could not imagine going back to the old system’. Integration with the practices iSoft Synergy clinical system has also eliminated the risk of referrals being associated with the wrong patient and has helped remove the laborious manual processes the practice had in place to audit possible missed referrals. The audit has now become a very easy task saving hours each week.

The Crescendo solution also includes a full reporting and management suite. ‘The reporting module is exceptionally good and will help the practice with Practice Based Commissioning reporting, workflow management and much more. Our End of Year Referrals Report is now just a couple of clicks away instead of looking through and counting referrals on multiple spreadsheets’ Vicky stated, and concluded ‘The whole system has far outperformed our expectations. The installation and training process was very simple and well managed and we have experienced benefits right across the practice. As the referral process is now so much faster and more efficient, our staff are now able to assist with other vital tasks around the practice much more quickly. The Crescendo system has really helped us improve our patient service and I would recommend it to anyone.’

For more information, press only:

Elizabeth Mandilaras, Crescendo Systems Corporation, 1-800-724-2930, liza@crescendo.com

John Bendall, Crescendo Systems Limited, 0844 846 6418, johnb@crescendosystems.co.uk