About our client
The Midwives’ Clinic of East York-Don Mills is a partnership of approximately 20 midwives who provide prenatal care and attend births at home, Michael Garron Hospital and the Toronto Birth Centre in the Toronto area. Along with a team of administrative staff, this clinic cares for approximately 450 patients per year. They are registered with the College of Midwives of Ontario and adhere to all standards and requirements set by this governing body.
The challenge
The Midwives’ Clinic of East York-Don Mills has operated out of their current location since 2002.
Over this time, The Midwives’ Clinic of East York-Don Mills had amassed a sizable amount of physical patient records in their primary location as well as at a secondary storage location.
Each pregnancy for each woman is recorded in an individual patient chart. When a patient returns to the clinic with a new pregnancy, the earlier patient records were retrieved from storage for reference. This process was tedious, time-consuming and took staff away from other important, patient-facing tasks.
The clinic staff knew that they needed a more modern solution and had begun an in-house scanning project. Again, this in-house scanning project took staff away from time with patients. There was an immediate need for outsourced document scanning of the remaining historic files. The goal of the file conversion project was to ensure compliance with document retention regulations, to free up space in the records rooms and to create digital patient records.
To save time and to provide optimal patient care, The Midwives’ Clinic of East York were also looking for a high-quality, secure, accurate and cost-effective solution to facilitate the management of digital Patient Records.
The solution
Following an extensive evaluation process, Octacom was chosen by The Midwives’ Clinic of East York-Don Mills as their partner to provide document scanning and hosting services.
Octacom’s reputation and vast experience with Health Records, security credentials, and cost-effectiveness were the deciding factors. Octacom’s Odiss™ Document Management Software was leveraged as the cloud-based document archive. Its security compliances allow for hosting of Canadian Personal Health Information. Odiss™ is 100% owned and supported by Octacom with no reliance on any 3rd party software or licenses. Odiss™ is scalable and provides The Midwives’ Clinic of East York with administrative flexibility for full self-service.
Initially, Octacom provided on-site document packing services for all historic, closed Patient Records. Next, all of the Patient Records were scanned, indexed and loaded into Octacom’s Odiss™ Document Management Software. Patient Records were loaded into Odiss™ in batches based on a priority sequence so as not to impact care of active patients.
Once loaded, the records were immediately available to clinic staff. Urgent retrievals were processed with a priority scan and upload into Odiss™ resulting in a seamless transition to a digital records environment for clinic staff. Going forward, Octacom will provide ongoing scanning and load to Odiss™ on a regular frequency to The Midwives’ Clinic of East York-Don Mills.
The results
The team members from The Midwives’ Clinic of East York-Don Mills find the Odiss™ functionality intuitive and straightforward. With minimal training, the administrative staff and midwives are able to immediately access patient records by searching based on a number of Patient search fields.
The clinic no longer requires off-site storage for Patient Records. Administrative staff and midwives have immediate access to patient records at anytime and anywhere resulting in access to valuable information and improved patient care.
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"We are happy and satisfied with the service provided by Octacom. The transition process to transfer the client charts electronically was done smoothly. There was always help provided to us whenever we had questions. We were even able to get access to the files while they were in the process of scanning them. It has saved us a tremendous amount of time and effort in finding critical medical charts."
