Collingwood General & Marine Hospital
This hospital cuts the costs and time associated with meetings by using eScribe’s meeting management software.
About Collingwood Green & Marine Hospital
Industry: Healthcare
Location: Collingwood, ON
Founded: 1887
Collingwood General & Marine Hospital (CGMH) is a 68-bed facility serving more than 60,000 permanent residents and 3.5 million annual visitors to the communities of Wasaga Beach, Collingwood, Clearview, and the Blue Mountains in Ontario.
CGMH is an acute care facility providing emergency care, diagnostic services including lab, imaging, and cardio- respiratory therapy, as well as two inpatient units.
“What stood out above all else, though, was that eScribe is a Canadian company. It gave me a real sense of security to know that their servers were 100% on Canadian soil.”
Michael LaCroix, CFO
Collingwood Green & Marine Hospital
“We continue to strive to make the eScribe app the standard across the organization, so everyone has the same advantages our senior staff and board members enjoy.”
The Challenge
Collingwood Green and Marine Hospital is always looking for ways to cut overhead costs so they can provide better healthcare. For Michael Lacroix, Vice President of Corporate Services and CFO, one of his main focuses is on automating clerical procedures to achieve efficiencies and save money.
Inefficient and Unnecessary
A few years ago, as he watched an executive assistant manually sort and collate report packages for board members, he thought to himself, “there has to be a better way.”
Besides being a labour-intensive job (reports were 100-150 pages each), the process opened up the potential for confidentiality lapses, and the printed pages with full-colour graphics were costing a small fortune every year. Then, because board members are spread across a fairly large region, the packages were mailed or couriered to them, or members drove to Collingwood to pick them up.
The Solution
eScribe’s meeting management solution puts everything at their fingertips – instantly and securely, consolidated and archived. The eScribe Meetings app is an enhanced IOS application designed to provide board members and meeting participants with real-time access to eScribe meeting sites. No more collating hundreds of pages across a boardroom table.
No more costs for paper, printing and colour graphics. No more risk of leaving a confidential folder behind or sending it to the wrong person.
What’s more, the iPad app means more flexibility, enabling board members and the leadership team to have access to information from anywhere, at any time, and to collaborate on meeting notes and agendas.
“I wasn’t sure how well the iPad would go over. I talked about what we could do with it, showed some screenshots, and asked, ‘Is this something we want to do?’” LaCroix says. “To my surprise, it was unanimous. Not all board members had used an iPad before, so there was a huge learning curve. But they were excited that we were going this way, and I heard comments like ‘we’re so glad we did this’.”
With eScribe
- Multiple staff can edit the agenda directly at the same time
- Members can prepare for meetings in advance, posing questions and comments within the app
- Staff can prepare responses to questions and comments in advance of meetings
- The highlight feature and personal notes offer easy-to-see
The Results
Since deploying the eSCRIBE solution, CGMH has realized the following benefits:
- Meetings move forward more quickly and more productively, because a lot of questions
have already been dealt with – a real time saver for a busy executive team and board
members. - Confidentiality concerns are mitigated – only authorized people have access to classified material.
Printing costs are zero for eSCRIBE managed meetings. - Whereas board members used to carry around large binders that contained historical data, meeting notes and archival packages, now everything is in one place – on their iPads.
- Preparation time for meetings has been drastically cut (8 fewer hours).
- The hospital has reduced its environmental footprint by virtually eliminating the use of paper and ink for print materials.
Of the 70 meetings held every year, about 40% use eScribe to conduct meeting operations. That’s a huge impact on costs, efficiencies and security, and Lacroix is making plans to roll out the solution across all departments.
For Lacroix, the iPad app is the future of where things are heading, in terms of having people access information. Because it’s on the cloud, they can read, annotate, highlight and edit documents, utilizing instant communication and collaboration to get the job done efficiently. “
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