What began in 1915 as a home for sick children, has grown in more than 100 years into an organization with 11 locations for specialist medical rehabilitation. Rehabilitation Friesland is characterized by the request of the patient to be the starting point of every treatment. Providing assistance to people who are limited by complex consequences of a disorder, accident or illness, with the aim of: participation in society. That is what Rehabilitation Friesland is committed to.
Hetty van Dijk, Head of the Business Office for Rehabilitation Friesland, talks about the digitisation process they have carried out in collaboration with Archive-IT. Partly because of the different locations they have, they wanted to be able to guarantee the completeness and transparency of their files. Digitisation has made this possible.
Why digitisation
Hetty explains: “In the past, for pragmatic reasons, each location had its own files. However, this resulted in duplicate and partial files of a patient. Efficiency in the management of the file and accessibility at each location were the main reasons for us to digitize. We had all current files digitised. For us, these are the patients undergoing treatment and the patients who have stopped treatment for less than two years. Now every patient has one file. Wherever you are, this is the complete file.”
The total picture
“We’ve spoken to several parties, but at Archive-IT, the overall picture was right. It was about 25,000 files, so for us, experience was very important in the choice. It’s very nice to work with a party that you know is going to be okay. If a party thinks along with you, doesn’t let you come up with everything yourself and can demonstrate: ‘we’ve done this before’, then that inspires confidence. The fact that they had experience with HIX, so that all the digitised files were included in our EPD without any problems, was also taken into account. If you add to that the strict procedures regarding information security, quality and price; the picture is just right,” says Hetty.
Approach
“The critical files were the first to be digitized as soon as they entered Archive-IT. As a result, transport was actually the only moment that we had to miss the files for a while. If you cleverly plan that transport moment, you won’t even notice that the files are external. We estimated the number of files in advance to be lower than it actually was. As a result, a number of challenges came our way. As a result, the digitisation process took longer than planned. Fortunately, this did not bother us much, because if we needed a file that had not yet been digitised, we could very easily request it. Archive-IT then scanned it for us as a matter of priority, so that it was still quickly available.”
Seeing is believing
Finally, Hetty says: “I spent a day at Archive-IT to experience how the processes work in practice. I can recommend this to everyone. Only then can you see with your own eyes the amount of discipline that the employees have, the pace and the care with which they deal with customer data. I experienced that visit as very impressive and immediately gave me confidence. Accessible people who work together with you as a customer; consultation; dialogue: that’s what characterises Archive-IT.”
Rehabilitation Friesland is now working successfully with the historical paper file in digital form within their EPD HIX from Chipsoft. This fits in perfectly with their main goal. Because in this way they have once again been able to make a considerable efficiency improvement, which means that they can focus even better on providing help. That’s what it’s all about.