Specialist outsourcing firm Essex Medical and Forensics Services (EMFS) is using customer relationship management (CRM) software to organise the 150-strong group of doctors, nurses and paramedics it has on its books.

The company, which was established earlier this year to provide outsourced medical and forensic services to UK police forces for custody incidents, is the first UK organisation to use Microsoft Dynamics CRM version 3.

EMFS business director Steve Roberts says the system is saving the company an average of 30 seconds on every request it receives for medical staff.

‘The extra speed comes from determining at the point of contact who goes out, and for what reasons. There is a huge variety of incidents to respond to, from murder to minor ailments,’ said Roberts.

‘We need to make sure that we get the right person for the incident.

‘We work in a semi-contact centre environment, taking 200 calls per day, so based on the rate we pay our call handlers, we are now getting a £7,500 saving per annum thanks to the new CRM system,’ he said.

The flexibility of the system, set up for EMFS by Microsoft partner Aspective, has also been useful, says Roberts.

‘We are running most of the 150 medics on our books on a rota basis, taking their spare time from ambulance services, hospitals and so on. They tell us they can work so many shifts per month, and we organise that within the system,’ he said.

‘We also use the CRM system to determine who is closest to which police station, so that we can minimise the time it takes for the person we are sending to reach the incident.’

The CRM system is helping EMFS cope with the bureaucratic side of policing and medicine, according to Roberts.

‘When someone goes into custody there is always a lot of forms to fill out. When you add the medical side to this, there is even more. One of the advantages of
the system is that it has created a single system for getting all this done, from which we immediately found savings,’ said Roberts.