Case study

Established in 2015, the Patient Ombudsman resolves complaints about health sector organisations in Ontario, from hospitals to care homes and community care.

An end-to-end case management system that could support their processes was a key requirement from day one. A robust procurement exercise led to the selection of Workpro case management software in 2016.

As the organisation has matured and evolved, their Workpro solution has adapted to changing process and reporting needs. 

• Workpro is used to document and track complaints, standardise, and streamline workflows and provide management reporting and information
• Cases can be received from a variety of sources e.g., web form, letter, e-mail, or telephone
• Validation tools ensure data is accurate and complete, saving time & reducing errors
• All documentation is securely stored within the case record for easy retrieval
• E-mail and document templates ensure consistent, professional correspondence
• Alerts and reminders prompt case progress
• Dashboards allow managers to review case progress to quickly identify any issues.

Workpro’s key strength is the level of management information provided by the system. The insights gained from the data collected are vital for learning and improvement initiatives. Workpro supports the Patient Ombudsman to:

• Capture and record every case and its outcome for reporting purposes
• Categorise data during the workflow, for trend tracking and analysis.

An online submission form was developed for the Patient Ombudsman to allow complainants to easily record a complaint using a web form.

Upon submission, the complainant is immediately provided with a case reference number and a case is automatically created in the Workpro complaints management system.

The complainant is guided on the web form to provide the right information, selecting items from lookup lists, such as the health service organisation they have an issue with. The case is pre-populated with this information, avoiding the need for staff to type in details from a paper form. This saves time and removes the risk of manual errors.

With Canadian in-country hosting now available, Patient Ombudsman is moving from an on-premise server to a cloud-hosted solution for their Workpro system. This ensures the Patient Ombudsman can benefit from lower hosting costs as well as:

• A more easily scalable solution – it’s easy to increase (or decrease) resources in the hosted environment.
• Built in “redundancy” - all components have fail-over backups.
• A single stop shop for managing the infrastructure and the application. The Workpro team manage the entire platform leading to better system performance and faster fix / response times for issues and requests.