Cornwall Clinical Services
Executive Summary
Cornwall Clinical Services (CCS) recently upgraded from older, inefficient practice management systems to MediOffice to keep up with rising costs, new patient expectations, and day-to-day challenges.
They were looking for a modern solution that brought everything into one place—something with a patient portal, mobile access, AI transcription, and that was also cost-effective. MediOffice stood out thanks to its easy-to-use design, helpful support team, and up-to-date features. Switching over was straightforward, with all their existing data transferred smoothly.
Since making the change, CCS has seen clear improvements - outstanding debt has been cut in half, admin costs have gone down, more patients are attending their appointments, and communication with patients is much better.
Consultants particularly value being able to access notes in real time and use AI-powered transcription, which helps them respond faster and work more closely with their colleagues.
The move to MediOffice has made things run more efficiently and improved the experience for both staff and patients—without major disruption.
Sara, the practice manager, said the system is not only easy to use, but the support and ongoing updates have made a real difference.
Setting the Scene
Cornwall Clinical Services (CCS) is a practice of 15 consultant surgeons and anaesthetists in Truro, Cornwall and London. Established in 2003, they work out of several different hospitals, conduct around 4,000 outpatient appointments, and perform about 1,800 procedures per year. They employ a practice manager, Sara, and two support staff.
From 2006 CCS had been running two practice management systems (PMS), Bluespier for diary management and clinical records (to link in with the main hospital system) and PPM for billing.
In 2022 several factors motivated the practice to relook at their PMS:
• Older consultants were retiring, and younger consultants were joining. These younger consultants had higher expectations of a modern PMS.
• The funding arrangements for the PMS had changed and using the now old Bluespier and PPM systems together had become expensive for the practice.
• The PMS market had developed, and several new modern systems were now available with options to improve the efficiency of practices, whilst reducing costs.
The Challenge
Using two systems, even with an integration, was resulting in additional work. Surgeons were coding in Bluespier, and the admin team then had to enter these codes into PPM for billing. The potential for mistakes was high which carried with it a risk of lost revenue.
As the practice was growing the costs associated with transcription, postage of letters to patients and GPs, and general administration were increasing rapidly.
Patients were now expecting to book appointments pay invoices online and receive letters electronically. None of this was possible with the existing systems.
Neither Bluespier or PPM were being proactively developed and remote access to Bluespier was difficult for busy consultants on the move.
Without a change in PMS the practice’s costs would continue to increase and they would struggle to grow efficiently.
The Search for a Solution
A short list of the criteria needed for a new system was put together by Sara and her team:
• One system to manage everything.
• A patient portal where patients could securely view their records, book appointments and pay their invoices.
• A mobile app for busy consultants to use on the go.
• An AI based transcription service.
• All existing data should be moved to the new system.
• Ideally it should be cheaper or the same cost as the existing systems.
• It should have features that result in tangible financial savings.
• The user interface and experience should be clean and easy to use.
Based on these criteria, Sara, the practice manager, arranged demos of a number of different systems including MediOffice.
The Decision
For CCS it was an easy decision to chose MediOffice for a number of reasons:
• They could tell a lot of thought went into the software —out of all the systems they looked at, this one was the easiest to use. Hence Sara felt that her team would be up and running in a short space of time, which was important to ensure the continuity of the practice.
• The features offered by MediOffice meant that the practice could move forward and modernise quickly and easily.
• The support offered by the team at MediOffice was second to none in doing the system setup, data import and initial hand holding.
• The monthly costs going forward would be substantially cheaper.
• The MediOffice product development team were (and still are) open to new ideas to add new features and enhance the product. Hence, they were happy to work closely with CCS.
• CCS felt they could trust MediOffice especially based on the track record of the development team.
Of course, changing the software system that runs a business is a major change and can be scary. However, CCS had the confidence that MediOffice was best placed to ensure that this process went smoothly.
The Implementation
The first step was for Sara to notify the existing providers of the intention to move and to agree a date for the data migration. The MediOffice team then worked together with Sara to collect the information needed to setup their new MediOffice system. This meant that within a few days MediOffice was setup and configured with each consultant’s profile eg diary, letterhead, codes, fees, email templates, letter templates etc. The rest of the admin staff were added as users and given a getting started guide so they could start getting used to the system.
All users were given a few weeks to familiarise themselves with MediOffice and to make sure everything was in place and working before the go-live date.
Sample data from Bluespier and PPM was imported into the new MediOffice system so the practice could be confident that on the go-live date, all the data would be there and be in the right place.
On the agreed date, the full practice data was imported from Bluespier and PPM. This included patients, third parties (eg GPs), notes, letters, files (eg x-rays, scanned notes, results), invoices, payments and credits. Reports were run in the old systems and in MediOffice to make sure everything was correct.
The practice then quickly settled into new workflow processes, immediately seeing benefits especially in reducing outstanding debt and increasing the turnaround of the clinic’s admin work.
The Benefits
The Consultants:
• loved the accuracy of the AI transcription and the fact that they could now build their own structured operation notes in MediOffice
• benefit from accessing patient notes when travelling, either on their phone or computers, which has also greatly increased the responsiveness of the practice to patients
• find it easy to support each other during leave due to the shared records facility
• started using MediOffice to automate the collection of patient reviews using Doctify
The Practice:
• Increased income - within a few months the practice had reduced their outstanding debt by more than 50% due to the automated reminder function and subsequent ease with which patients could make payments
• Reduced costs – the electronic letter delivery to patients and GPs immediately reduced the postage costs and associated admin time
• Reduced DNAs - there were fewer missed appointments due to the automated email and SMS reminders
• Patient feedback - the practice has had many positive comments from patients who often receive their letters from a consultation before they even get back home
Overall there was a very positive feeling and general excitement about the new system and the working relationship with MediOffice.
In Conclusion
Whilst we at MediOffice have been delighted by the success of this project, the results are perhaps best captured in Sara’s own words:
“The experience of switching our practice management system was a lot easier than we expected. There was very little disruption to the operation of the practice. The support of the MediOffice team has been excellent and it feels like a real partnership working with them.
MediOffice is extremely pro-active in bringing out new features and going forwards, as a practice, we intend to use more of the AI functions.
The practice recently took on a new member of staff and, within a day, they were completely self-sufficient in using MediOffice. Having worked with many systems over the years I can safely say MediOffice is the most intuitive – it just works!
Overall, it has been a very positive experience moving to MediOffice and I would be happy to chat with anybody who is considering switching to them.”
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