Are Docman doing the right thing?
I saw a demo of their AI yesterday. It looks good. It can summarise a long letter an into pertinent brief paragraph to make it easier to read. It will hopefully code the letter too and put this into my EPR neither of these seem ground-breaking any more.
It doesn’t seem to be doing all of this yet and appears to be taking quite a while to get there but perhaps the slow but steady tortoise wins the race.
However their current strategy seems to be to charge extra for this functionality. There is no money in the system so I cant see the NHS picking up this cost and practices while being sold a story of how much money it should save them in admin time will find this difficult to believe or even see so are going to be reluctant to pay and dealing with 6000 customers is never easy.
Docman is currently centrally funded which seems an enviable position. However not many people I know like it - the UI is not great and hasn’t changed/improved for years. A lot of practices are saying why do we bother with it - EMIS X or other might have just as good a system and not trap up in holding our documents in a separate system. There is also the possibility that provider IT systems get better at sending structured coded information so we don’t have to use cutting edge AI to read and interpret it (imagine that)
There is a real danger that ICBs will see dropping the costs of docman as a win for their IT budgets - I would be as quickly as possibly adding value to my core funded product to make it indispensable and wanted by the users who might fight any move to get rid of me.