Pharmacy Health In Loc Portugal

Challenge

Document management in the drug supply organization is a complex and costly process. Maintaining the traditional paper filing system takes up space, and as the volume of documents increases, it becomes more and more impossible to have an important document available when needed.

Digitization in healthcare organizations is no longer an optional condition, but a necessity

In the heart of the Portuguese municipality of Pontinha in the district of Lisbon, the "health in loc" pharmacy is very close to its customers. The pharmacy sees itself as the link between doctor and patient.

So not only are countless medicines, remedies and care products always in stock in the pharmacy, good advice is also part of the excellent service. In addition, the pharmacy provides its customers with individualized drug preparation. Extensive legal requirements must be met for this. Excellent organization and management of the pharmacy is a prerequisite for profitability and ensures legal certainty.

PaperOffice DMS is used by Portuguese pharmacy "health in loc" to centralize and organize information from multiple sources and to minimize the time and cost of maintaining a physical archive. Access to the information is digital.

Starting position

The digital transformation and the term "digitization" has been on everyone's lips since the pandemic at the latest and is now no longer an optional condition for many companies but also health organizations, but a necessity.
The topic of digital further development is also firmly established in the circles of drug supply organizations. Because even in a pharmacy there are quite extensive administrative tasks, which were previously done manually and in an analogous way.

Existing problems and tasks

In the past, the entire pharmacy system was based on paper. But with the existing and daily incoming documents, such as delivery notes and monthly collective invoices from various major customers, the manual system reached its limits and the paper archive grew more and more.

At the same time, the number of invoices by e-mail increased, which were also printed out for archiving. But the complex amount of work did not save the findability of the entire documentation

In addition, it was required by law to keep the production documentation for the individualized medicines with detailed logs, because every formulation requires a plausibility check, manufacturing instructions and a manufacturing log. This type of data must also be archived in an audit-proof manner in accordance with the law.

Each recipe requires a lot of documented documentation

Invoices and orders used to be kept in one place and documentation in another place, the connections were almost impossible given the amount of documents and the associated information.

"Our traditional paper filing system was becoming increasingly problematic. Finding important documents when they were needed became an impossible task. Thanks to the use of PaperOffice DMS, everything is found in seconds and we can comply with legal regulations with significantly less effort."

recalls Henrique Santos, managing director of the pharmacy.

Why the Portuguese pharmacy "health in loc" chose PaperOffice DMS

Mr. Henrique Santos, managing director and administrative employee of the pharmacy, was looking for a document management system that would enable secure but also adaptable data storage due to the existing challenges.

Adaptability was an important selection criterion, but also the cost-benefit factor.

In the beginning, the organization did not want to make large investments. After Mr. Santos searched the international document management market on the Internet, he came across PaperOffice DMS.

First, a local installation license was purchased and PaperOffice DMS was thoroughly tested. After a short period of time, the pharmacy decided to add more licenses and once the organization realized they could rely on PaperOffice, a Synology NAS was purchased. Thanks to the easy database setup and migration, all existing data was initially transferred. At this point in time, all of the company's documentation is centralized in this database.

"We first bought a local installation license, then more, and once we realized we could rely on PaperOffice DMS, we switched from local to a Synology NAS, where we currently have all of the company's documentation centralized.”

In addition to PaperOffice DMS, Mr. Henrique Santos tested other software products from other system houses and initially examined various software offers in relation to document management.

Mr. Santos emphasizes that a suitable system has been sought for a long time. However, none of the previously tested software vendors were scalable or flexible enough for the job a document management system was supposed to do.

"For several years we have been experimenting and looking for solutions. For some time we have used Paperport in on-premises solutions. The result was that large amounts of documents were lost. Experiments with Paperport in the cloud have always been unsuccessful due to the difficult configuration of the system."

The fact that PaperOffice was finally used for document management at the pharmacy was decided for the following reasons:

1. Data storage and availability. Central and easy access to all relevant documents and the possibility of multiple parties collaborating on the same document.

An internal, central storage that can be accessed by all employees. The data should not be stored in a third-party cloud or on a single-user computer.

2.Value for money. The software should have a good price-performance ratio.

For the Portuguese pharmacy "health in loc", it was very important that after an initial investment, the software slightly and easily scalable could be multiplied to additional licenses or other databases and this would not involve high costs would be.

The number of user licenses purchased can be increased at any time. In this way, the pharmacy was able to avoid excessive capital commitment.

3. Easy to handle. The software should require as little training as possible, be self-explanatory and clear (in terms of documents).

No external and expensive "consultants" on site and no one has to travel anywhere for training. Everyone can define the time frame for learning the menu navigation themselves as required and in terms of the future, PaperOffice DMS is well positioned thanks to its modular structure.

"We chose PaperOffice DMS because we personally tested the software and were impressed by the ease of use Integration into the Windows environment and a clean user interface to work with inspires."

4. Reliability and security. Software was sought to digitize analogue documents and to easily find them again when needed.

Thanks to the integrated AI function, each document can be taught, all desired content can be extracted in a targeted manner and stored with keywords in a fully automated manner.

PaperOffice DMS offers exactly what Mr. Santos was looking for.

How was PaperOffice DMS integrated?

In 2019, before the start of the pandemic, the use of PaperOffice began. The pharmacy decided to archive everyday documents and emails in PaperOffice DMS.

Thanks to a powerful scanner and the scanner connection in PaperOffice, the conversion of the analogue papers could begin. All documents were gradually read and digitized via the PaperOffice OCR scanner interface. A keyword index is already created for each document while it is being read in, which can be used to find it in a flash using the PaperOffice search engine.

All formulations of the individually manufactured medicines were scanned with the entire documentation, automatically tagged and stored in the central document pool.

Digitization has a positive impact on the environment and many other benefits

Existing folders in the hanging files were taken over 1:1 and simply converted into "digital folders".

All existing e-mails were saved directly in PaperOffice DMS, could be linked to existing documents or individually manufactured medicines and will no longer have to be printed out on paper in the future. And all incoming e-mails are automatically archived to PaperOffice by folder monitoring through set up rule management.

Since using PaperOffice DMS, paper consumption has decreased noticeably.

"Today we use PaperOffice together with the Synology NAS, which offers us an economical and of course up-to-date document management model. We have very good support and frequent updates from PaperOffice. The system is very fast and saves us a lot of work when filing and searching for documents from everyday administration."

Overall Experience Summary

PaperOffice is a document management system with an excellent user interface, which is easy to use and adds value to a company.