Hyland, Creator of OnBase, has shown it has heart as well as brains, enabling a worthy cause to dramatically increase its efficiency and enjoy the benefits usually reserved for large corporations.

Thanks to the successful pilot project in which it implemented the company’s OnBase software, mothers2mothers (m2m), which helps keep HIV-positive women healthy while mitigating against the transmission of the disease to their children, has now expanded its reach, beyond the five pilot sites to a current 31.

The good news does not stop there, since the project has been so successful that m2m is aiming to breach the double digit mark and with the necessary funding, envisions rolling out its initiative nationwide to 100 sites and potentially across Africa.

Hyland Software project consultant Rory Pairman explained that m2m faced a number of challenges in fulfilling its mission to ensure that HIV positive mothers and their children remained healthy, while working to eliminate the transmission of HIV from mothers to their children than they can actually act on.

Overcoming obstacles

The first obstacle in m2m’s path was the difficulty in tracking the progress of the program due to the increasingly large amount of records generated. Exacerbating matters was that forms were duplicated by the Mentor Mothers, the women employed by mothers2mothers.

Additionally, m2m had a particularly displaced workforce spread across several regions dealing with important data that pertained to mothers’ wellbeing, which was previously captured and stored on paper. However, as mothers would move around and go elsewhere for treatment, these clinics would have no way of accessing their historical records.

Thus m2m sought a solution that would allow information, data and ongoing care regimens to be recorded, captured and tracked efficiently.

To this end, the project entailed equipping Mentor Mothers with HP scanners and OnBase content management software. Clients would then only need to fill out a questionnaire in the field, which would subsequently be scanned, managed and made accessible from one central repository. The OnBase Mobile solution then enabled Mentor Mothers to securely access these electronic forms from a smartphone, from anywhere.

Benefit bounty

By implementing Hyland Software’s OnBase solution, not only were the myriad of challenges addressed, but the content management system also brought several other positive benefits. Pairman elaborated that the speed of data capture increased; there was a reduction in the manual labour associated with the old way of capturing Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission of HIV (PMTCT) related medical information in paper logbooks; and mothers’ information could be retrieved, and if need be, modified, at any time and irrespective of where their clinic was located.

Enabling staff at clinics to process more forms in less time and more efficiently had another knock-on benefit, of enabling clinics to see and attend to more mothers. Furthermore, accessing data was reduced from months to a matter of hours, while bringing consistency and continuity to tracking patients as they moved from one region to another.

This in turn helped m2m fulfil its objective of ensuring that Mentor Mothers could check that mothers were receiving the right treatment to manage their condition.  The success of the phased project – which ran for two months – not just met m2m’s expectation but also enabled them to expand the scope of the project. While the solution rolled out to just 29 staff to start, in a mere four months, the number expanded to 102 users and continues to grow.

Towards a healthier future

That is not the only promising aspect of this worthy project. The m2m project may well spark off some other healthcare benefits. For example, the accessibility of healthcare information makes it easier for the data to be analysed, which means it is more feasible that key indicators of tuberculosis associated with HIV could be caught more readily.

While Hyland Software has engaged in other philanthropic and humanity focused initiatives, the m2m project is notable for another reason, as it marks the first of the company’s efforts locally.

“HP recommended that we research Hyland’s ECM solution to support this project. Because HP is one of our existing partners who understand our mission and the results we hope to accomplish, we trusted their suggestion,” commented Shungu Gwarinda, country director at m2m. “We chose OnBase because it will allow us to effectively track the progress of each mother’s case and easily monitor data to find trends and locate vital information in seconds.”

“We are delighted to be working with m2m and supporting such a worthy cause,” added James Longstaff, sales director, “m2m’s OnBase solution will dramatically improve the outcomes by connecting Mentor Mothers with records in real-time, enabling faster care and guidance, showing that ECM is an important component in healthcare,” he concluded.