How Smartbox.ai frees up frontline NHS staff by taking the headache away from DSARs
The NHS receives thousands of complex Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs) annually, which require extensive time and effort from frontline medical staff. This detracts from their primary role of treating patients, leading to longer waiting lists and heightened frustration.
The Challenge
Daily, the NHS receives DSARs primarily from ex-employees and patients seeking their medical records for various reasons. Handling these requests involves sifting through tens of thousands of documents, predominantly emails with numerous attachments. Each DSAR takes approximately 52.5 hours to process manually, costing around £1,258 per request. If an organisation was getting 120 of these per year that equates to 5,985 hours per year at a cost of £143,432. But the NHS is dealing with thousands, if not tens of thousands of them a year.
In addition to the sheer volume, the process is complicated by:
- Duplication: Between 40% and 60% of the data can be duplicates.
- High Stakes: Identifying third-party names and those of doctors and clinicians. Why? Because all third-party names need to be redacted.
- Medical record contamination: There is a very real chance that some medical records have been mixed up, maybe a couple of pages of a child’s medical records have accidentally been included in a different person’s records.
- Sensitive information: Certain details in medical records may cause significant mental distress to the healthcare professionals handling the case.
Third-party medical records disclosure is a significant issue for the NHS because getting it wrong will result in an £85,000 fine. Pretty much every single NHS Trust, certainly every board that we speak to, had a problem with medical record contamination.
How Smartbox.ai Can Help
Smartbox.ai streamlines this process by automating many of the manual tasks involved:
- Automated Conversion: Automatically convert all of the files into a PDF at a rate of 10,000 pages per hour.
- Deduplication: Reduce the number of files by removing duplicates, near duplicates, and clutter. Smartbox.ai allows to shrink dataset size by three times through smart analysis and bulk deduplication.
- Data Highlighting: Automatically finds and highlights third-party, personal or sensitive data.
- Bulk Redaction: Remove all third-party data in a few clicks and leave the doctors/clinicians’ names in place.
- Risk Indicators: A dictionary of words relating to abuse, sexual assault and other really sensitive information. Smartbox.ai highlights risk indicators, allowing the user to navigate through to the page that the risk indicator is on and make a judgement.
These tools significantly reduce the time and effort required from NHS staff. For instance, Smartbox.ai helped a high-security psychiatric hospital reduce its DSAR response time by 75%, enhancing accuracy and reducing risk.
Real Savings
By using Smartbox.ai, the cost per DSAR drops to just over £17, freeing up thousands of hours that can be redirected towards patient care. For example, one NHS customer reduced 36,000 files to 374 relevant ones, significantly cutting down processing time and effort.
Smartbox.ai thus provides a vital service, enabling NHS staff to focus on their core duties, improving efficiency, and ensuring the confidentiality and accuracy of sensitive patient information.
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