South Tyneside NHS Trust recently announced that they have decided to deploy Huddle to achieve paperless board meetings. South Tyneside NHS Trust is a provider of community and hospital services to the people of South Tyneside and surrounding areas.
In a statment, Martin Alexander, director of information services at South Tyneside NHS Trust, said, "Creating and distributing the board report every month was a logistical nightmare. Email is a poor collaboration tool when it comes to file management and the biggest problems are version control and security. When you send an email attachment to 20 people, you end up with 20 different versions of the same file stored locally on people's devices. No one knows which version is final or what content has changed. Many of the secretaries also had to spend significant amounts of time standing next to the photocopier to create hard copies of the final document."
In response, the company turned to Huddle, a cloud based content collaboration solution. A Huddle workspace was created for each meeting, allowing all content associated with a particular meeting to be stored in one central place and administered by a specific secretary.
Now, board members will be able to review relevant documentation and securely access their board packs from their homes or remote office locations using their iPads and Huddle. This has resulted in massive reduction of Trust’s paper usage from printing and collating all of the paperwork ahead of meetings, and has also saved significant amounts of time.
Alastair Mitchell, CEO of Huddle, said, "Healthcare organizations are increasingly looking for innovative and secure ways to support an increasingly mobile workforce and provide people with access to the information they need regardless of their location. South Tyneside NHS Trust's use of iPads and Huddle to achieve its paperless meeting objective is a shining example of how new technology can improve productivity and increase efficiencies. As we've increased our NHS contracts by 44% over the same period last year, it looks like many other Trusts will be following South Tyneside NHS Trusts lead."
Edited by Blaise McNamee