Case study

The Patient Ombudsman Ontario resolves complaints about health sector organisations in Ontario, from hospitals to care homes and community care.

As a newly established Ombudsman, the organisation selected Workpro as their end-to-end case management system.  As the organisation has matured and evolved, their Workpro solution has adapted to changing process and reporting needs.

Workpro is used to document and track complaints, standardise and streamline workflows and provide management reporting and information.

• Cases can be received from a variety of sources e.g. web form, letter, e-mail or telephone
• Validation tools ensure data is accurate and complete, saving time & reducing errors
• All documentation is securely stored within the case record for easy retrieval
• E-mail and document templates ensure consistent, professional correspondence
• Alerts and reminders prompt case progress
• Dashboards allow managers to review case progress to quickly identify any issues.

Workpro’s key strength is the level of management information provided by the system, vital for learning and improvement initiatives. Workpro supports the Patient Ombudsman to:

• Capture and record every case and its outcome for reporting purposes
• Categorise data during the workflow, for root cause and trend analysis.

An online submission form was developed for the Patient Ombudsman to allow complainants to easily record a complaint using a web form.

Upon submission, the complainant is immediately provided with a case reference number and a case is automatically created in the Workpro complaints management system.

The complainant is guided on the web form to provide the right information, selecting items from lookup lists, such as the health service organisation they have an issue with. The case is pre-populated with this information, avoiding the need for staff to type in details from a paper form. This saves time and removes the risk of manual errors.