With revenues today totalling ?43 million, Kingsley Healthcare operates 29 homes throughout the UK providing a range of care services to over 1,100 patients looked after by 1,500 staff.
Wasantha Darshana, Kingsley Healthcare’s group IT director, says, “When the business was founded 17 years ago, we had just one home and 23 beds. Since then, we’ve achieved EBITDA
[1] growth of 35% year on year and our strategy moving forward is to expand through acquisition and organically buying or building new properties. The investment in IT systems like File Stream enables us to do this easily while avoiding the recruitment of additional support staff which obviously reduces our operational cost structure.”
Kingsley Healthcare has installed the latest version of File Stream – version 4.5 - to manage the vast amount of paperwork associated with running its residential, dementia, nursing and learning and disability residences, in addition to HR and other administrative functions
[2]. It is also using Filestream’s workflow module to improve workplace collaboration, document sharing and sign off.
Darshana says, “It doesn’t matter whether you are based at our Lowestoft HQ, locally at one of the care homes or our administrative centre in Sri Lanka, all employees have access to the same information – it’s a secure virtual environment without any physical boundaries.”
DocuSign now integrated with File Stream for contract management
Further to a thorough review process, File Stream has been integrated with DocuSign which provides electronic signature technology and digital transaction management to enable electronic exchanges of contracts and signed documents. This is an important new solution for a geographically dispersed business like Kingsley Healthcare with lots of employment and patient contracts some of which are complex and involve third parties like social services.
Darshana explains, “If you take patients, you can imagine the administrative overhead of managing contracts using paper with so many people in so many homes especially as they have to be printed in triplicate – one for the individual, another kept at each residence and a copy then sent to our headquarters. It was headache to manage given the opportunity for errors.”
The new system means that a predefined DocuSign contract template has been set up and stored in File Stream. Authorised staff can then create a new contract, have a patient sign it using a handheld device such as an Android tablet or iPad with the document then stored centrally within the system, available to everyone.
Kingsley Healthcare GDPR compliant well before the May 25, 2018 deadline
The business has been working extensively on its GDPR preparations to ensure that all personal information is properly protected with policies established about data retention and usage. Kingsley Healthcare will be GDPR compliant by March 2018 – two months ahead of when
the new data management rules come into effect having undertaken a range of initiatives:
- Data retention policies have been created in File Stream to enable records to be kept or destroyed as required based on the specific compliance regulations;
- File Stream is configured to only allow access to patient and staff information by authorised users with all data held on site, backed up every four hours;
- The introduction and combination of File Stream and DocuSign means that all contractual information is securely held and a full audit trail monitoring access then available;
- Kingsley Healthcare has moved away from using VPN technology to implement a new secure MPLS network to connect its 29 sites. This has increased security along with the introduction of McAfee Data Loss Prevention (DLP) software and a new robust firewall solution to prevent hacking.
Return on investment from EDMS
The use of File Stream has had a tangible effect on the bottom line with Kingsley Healthcare estimating that it is saving around ?50,000 per annum using EDMS versus paper-based documents which are fast disappearing. Darshana says, “Most processes have been improved and we’re predominately electronic today. If you take purchase invoices, we receive about 5,000 every month but they arrive via email not paper and we import and index them automatically into File Stream.”
As the business scales, the expectation is that the investment in centrally managed IT and improved electronic processes will mean that the hiring of a corresponding number of back office staff will be avoided. Kingsley Healthcare predict that at 20% increase in homes will not require additional headcount.
Charles Hooker, Filestream’s managing director, says, “Sensible selection of IT is all about giving businesses competitive edge. One can see this very clearly with Kingsley Healthcare. They’re not the biggest provider of care services in the UK but they use our software cleverly to stay ahead of competitors and most importantly run their operations efficiently so they can focus on what really counts – and that is the care of their patients.”
