7th September, 2009, Newbury, UK. eShare, the leading provider of board assurance software, today announced that NHS South East Essex (NHS SEE) has selected eShare’s eMeetings application for all its meeting management requirements.
NHS SEE currently relies upon administrators, email and post to manage meetings. With eMeetings they will access a centralised meeting management site where meeting-related activities such as agendas, papers and tasks can be documented, managed, issued and tracked.
Viv Barnes, Associate Director of Corporate Governance, sees several ways in which eMeetings will improve the way meetings are managed at NHS SEE. "I immediately saw the advantages that eMeetings would offer us in terms of speeding up the process of preparing for board meetings and sub-committees. It will make the collation and distribution of board packs much easier.” She continued, “In fact, it will put board members in control - enabling them to access agendas and papers at their convenience, instead of receiving large amounts of paperwork in the post or on email."
eMeetings has been designed to improve business continuity by creating a central location for storing and managing all documents relating to meetings. It creates templates which all administrators can access and adopt and, as all meeting packs are issued by sending out a link to the meeting site, the headache of issuing late papers is eliminated.
Alister Esam, Managing Director, eShare said “We are excited to be working with SEE. As an established provider of meeting management software to trust-based organisations we are seeing a huge amount of interest from NHS trusts for our software.” Barnes added “This is just the start. Once everyone is familiar with using eMeetings for creating and receiving agendas and board packs, the next step will be to start using the task manager feature. This will issue automatic reminders and notifications of tasks; it won’t just be down to the committee administrator to look through minutes and manually issue reminders.” She continued, “Task owners will be able to update status through to completion. This will overcome the common issue of tasks being completed late or being overlooked altogether until the next meeting.”
Barnes sees more future potential for the eShare System "Already we are investigating further modules from eShare including eDecisions to help with the many different decisions that our board is required to make between meetings."
Esam concluded “Our recent survey found that 81% of respondents found meeting paperwork and administration a burden, yet only 25% had implemented a software solution to address the problem. Our experience with NHS SEE and a number of other NHS Trusts is that eMeetings presents the first true solution to this age-old problem.”