Medway Community Healthcare (MCH) is an award winning social enterprise established in 2011 that serves the needs of 400,000 people. They work to support and improve local communities, keeping people healthy and making sure that they are part of a wider picture of all-round health and wellbeing in Medway and beyond. They are one of the largest employers in the area with over 1,600 staff.
MCH wanted to move from a series of systems that were clunky and expensive, to a single holistic platform that met their needs. As Ryan shares;
“We had standalone systems that did not talk to each other and so required a great deal of manual intervention to be able to send information from one system to another. This problem was not unique to us.”
As a social enterprise and community interest company, MCH wanted to find a partner who shared their values, where maximising profit was not the primary concern. MCH have highly skilled staff but with varying levels of technology skills and so it was important to choose a solution that was simple, easy to use and required minimal training. Furthermore, once a new system was in place, overseeing a culture change in the organisation to embrace technology and move away from manual processes was pivotal.
MCH chose Zone to gradually transition to one single, fully integrated platform. This has enabled MCH to centralise data, streamline processes and have greater transparency at every level of the organisation. Beforehand, people followed different processes depending on which department they worked in. For example, to get information on staff such as sickness absence and leave, individual managers would have to fill-out forms and send them back to collate. Now, this information is always up to date and available at the click of a button. The system also updates hierarchies dynamically based on changes in staffing structures, so that managers always have up-to-date information about the areas they oversee.
MCH have also undertaken a project with Zone's development team to replace a number of systems they were using to manage risks, incidents, claims, complaints and requests for information (such as Subject Access Requests) in silo. This has allowed links between these events to be made and high-level reporting and notifications to be embedded into Zone. Managers also have access to similar reports as above, where they can easily view all outstanding actions and risk events relating to the areas they manage.
Implementing Zone has given MCH leaders much greater oversight of the organisation, particularly given that most of their teams work in the community. According to Ryan, this has led to time and cost savings across the organisation.
“Before Zone it was very difficult to get organisational oversight of staff sickness, annual leave and rotas. Now, the organisation has complete oversight and live dashboards presenting the data in real-time. We now have information we can act on, not just data”.
Not to be overlooked, MCH is also saving money, with a reduction in the licence fee and maintenance costs that come with running multiple systems.
“It was a big leap of faith to move away from the big players in the market, but it has been a perfect fit for our organisation”.
For Ryan, the simplest features are the most important:
“Given our team is out and about in the community, the system needs to be easy to use, accessible from anywhere and on any device. Zone does this really well. Not once have we been over promised. What stands out is the ability of each part of Zone’s system to talk to each other and integrate with other systems, such as the NHS Electronic Staff Record."
