Xyla Health & Wellbeing is a healthcare company providing diabetes prevention services to NHS England amongst other services. They are one of only 5 UK companies giving this service to the NHS.

They receive referral forms from practices countrywide containing the data of patients who need to be referred on to the program. Previously, these forms were received into email mailboxes and manually processed one by one into their systems.

To add to the complexity, there are certain properties that mean a referred patient isn’t eligible to be added to the program. This meant that every single form received into the business (roughly 400 per day) needed to be manually checked by a Xyla employee. Each form that was determined to be ineligible was then manually replied to via email to notify the referring practice of this outcome. This process can be labour intensive and prone to manual error.

Workflow Doctor Ltd used a combination of an email processing service, ABBYY Flexicapture, a custom-built backend application interface, and a web front-end to simplify the process.

Firstly, the system automatically sends acknowledgment emails back to the practices confirming receipt of their forms.

Emails are downloaded from the relevant ICS email inboxes and are loaded into the ABBYY Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine. This recognition software reads the data from the form and flags any immediate issues to one of Xyla’s ABBYY users. This would include missing or potentially invalid pieces of data (e.g. an NHS number must always have the same format).

Once the data quality is confirmed to be good, documents are exported from ABBYY into a purpose-built back-end database. Within this backend, a custom validation engine takes the data read from the form and determines if a patient is eligible or ineligible. Potentially ineligible patients are then displayed to the end-user in a web front-end so that the forms can be reviewed and confirmed.

Once all the forms have been confirmed as either eligible or ineligible, a file is generated containing eligible data to be loaded into Xylas internal systems. For each ineligible form, a reply is automatically sent back to the practice detailing the reasons why the patient does not qualify.