UK | June 23 2009.  As the UK’s largest provider of medico-legal reports, Premex handles 1000s of cases every week on behalf of leading insurance companies and personal injury law firms.  The core benefit of the service is the speed and accuracy with which Premex is able to arrange appointments with over 500 medical experts across all disciplines and then produce independent medical reports that form the basis of compensation claims. 

Vince Giles, Group IT Director at Premex explains “Liasing with 100s of medical experts on availability, then producing and quality checking 1000s of medical reports every week is labour intensive and has the potential to be error-prone. We realised that in order to extend our market leadership and scale the business we would need to automate key parts of our medico-legal workflow, especially appointment setting and the generation of medical reports”.

Vince continues “We also saw an opportunity to deliver a step change in our level of service by dramatically shrinking turn-around times and improving report accuracy. This meant making it easy for medical experts to directly capture the outcome of examinations themselves without, for example, having to type a report or dictate for a secretary to produce at a later date”.

However, because of the complex nature of medical consultations and the need for the reports to look like written English, Vince also realised that the work would require more than just a standard programming approach. “What we needed was a natural yet structured way of capturing medical expert input, and then automatically generating a report that contained all the critical information, such as a clear prognosis, such that it read as written English so, if necessary, it could be used in a Court of Law”

Vince invited Tessella to work on the project. “We needed a development partner with an understanding of expert systems and intelligent report generation, as well as IT. Becuse of their background in science Tessella were a natural choice”.

The Solution

Vince continues “I was immediately impressed by the calibre of the Tessella consultants. They were quick to understand the principles of what we were trying to achieve and rapidly moved things along”.

After a feasibility and design phase, Tessella adapted some of their existing knowledge and experience of expert systems to form the core of the questionnaire and report writing engine in C# Windows Forms and XML. The tool uses a series of intelligent prompts, boxes and radio buttons to capture the input of medical experts following a consultation with an injured party.

The resulting report can then be presented as a written document or as an XML feed into other systems to form the basis of a claims evaluation. The XML feed in particular means that third-party claim assessors do not need to re-key information into their systems. This removes duplicated effort and time from the overall supply chain, which ultimately benefits all involved, especially the injured party.

Tessella have also enabled Premex to streamline their appointment setting process by developing an industry leading offering called Vu that allows medical experts to indicate when they are available to perform examinations. 

The system is an ASP.NET web application with an SQL database backend. The user interface makes extensive use of AJAX to provide a richer experience.

Making a booking is now a simple one-stop process, rather than a series of back and fore ‘phone calls and emails. Additionally, clients can book appointments with medical experts directly, providing even better service to the injured party.

The system makes use of the Google Maps API to highlight available appointment locations and provide the injured party with other useful information such as travel times and directions.

The Benefits

Vince is delighted with the results “We have already seen an immediate and dramatic improvement in turn-around times. For example, we are now receiving reports by 9am for consultations that happened the previous afternoon. Previously it was not uncommon for this to take a full two weeks.

Equally, the quality and completeness of reports has improved significantly. This means we need to spend less time doing basic QA checking, which has allowed us to direct resource onto more value add activities”.

The appointment setting application is also proving to be a success. Vince explains “Medical experts have taken to Vu in numbers well beyond our expectations. They are adding their availability for months ahead, which is allowing us to book appointments for our clients with a single call or email. This ease of making appointments will definitely translate into increased business for us down-stream”

“Overall, combining our ability to process more cases, attract and retain more clients and reduce our handling costs means we expect the new system to pay for itself in about a year. We now have a unique IT infrastructure that is not only delivering a step change in service, but will also provide a sound platform to rapidly scale the business” 

“Tessella have been critical to the success of the project.  We could not have realised our vision without their technology, unique blend of scientific and IT expertise and commitment to delivering high quality work”

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About Premex
Based in Bolton, Premex is the UK’s leading provider of independent medical reports, investigations and diagnostic and rehabilitation services used to assist in resolving legal claims in relation to personal injury. Originally established in 1996, the business now occupies around 20,000 sq. ft of high tech office space, employs over 400 people, in addition to having 9000 experts.  Premex handles over 140,000 cases a year – all controlled by a £2 million state-of-the-art case management and document handling system.

About Premex Group
Other members of the Premex Group include:

• Digital transcription services specialist Accuro
• 3D, which specializes in medical underwriting and claims management
• Premex Insight, a claims investigation company
• i-sign, specialists in providing document collection and explanation services to personal injury claimants

Further information is available at www.premexservices.co.uk

About Tessella
For decades, Tessella has been successfully delivering IT and consulting services to world leaders in R&D, science and engineering. We enable our clients in life sciences, energy, the public sector, and consumer industries to achieve a wide range of objectives, including, forecasting floods, developing fusion power, enhancing military sensor capability, improving drug discovery and development efficiency, and reducing risk to health and the environment in the extraction and production of oil and gas. With offices in Europe and North America, global companies rely on Tessella for business critical assignments.

Further information is available at www.tessella.com

Tessella
Christina Tealdi | Marketing Communications & PR Executive
Phone: +44 (0) 1235 555511 | Mobile: + 44 (0) 779 9346453
christina.tealdi@tessella.com

• Improve efficiency and productivity
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To achieve these goals we utilize our expertise in workflow. Workflow is the automation of a business or laboratory process in which documents, information or tasks are passed from one machine or person to another for action according to a set of procedural rules.

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