PATIENT RECORDS
F Electronic document management
in healthcare
One well accepted means of improving patient care is by freeing up the flow of vital information between different points of care. Some recent, high profile, EDM implementations in trusts across the UK are now starting to deliver on that goal, says Brendan Major
reeing the flow of vital information across different points of care
enables clinicians - whether in GP surgeries, hospitals, care homes or independent treatment centres - to use the most complete and up-to-date patient record to inform their care decisions.
Indeed, intelligent information and knowledge sharing, and a more joined-up experience, is now a critical priority right across the UK health service, particularly with the aim of moving more care out of the hospital.
The journey facing UK NHS trust hospitals, as they strive to modernise and boost patient care within the constraints of potentially brutal budget cuts, is an onerous one. This, coupled with the specific demands of NHS IT programmes, demands that hospitals digitise their records, so that critical information can be disseminated quickly and efficiently to the point of need in any given situation.
Whatever the ideals, however, healthcare establishments can only do what’s possible within the inevitable constraints that tie their hands - both organisationally and financially.
Projects must be initiated in manageable phases, according to the funds and staff resources available to them. Customised EDM solutions, which integrate with EPR systems, offer a practical middle ground,
Sep/Oct 10
allowing trusts to move forward today without jeopardising legacy investments and practices or limiting future potential. People buy-in is critical Cultural and practice-based considerations must not be neglected, certainly.
Over the years, across and beyond the health sector, computerised information systems have often quite spectacularly failed to deliver the expected benefits. Typically, this has been because they were not willingly adopted by the people required to use them – usually because too much was attempted too soon, taking already stressed and time-pressed staff out of their comfort zones.
The key to success is to manage a phased transition which embraces the new while acknowledging and accommodating old and familiar ways of working. This means including stakeholders from the outset and harnessing locally ‘owned’ and designed systems - which meet the operational requirements, are aligned with local strategies but do not impose additional burdens. This way, trusts can ensure greater acceptability and adoption.
Such an approach will not hamper the transition to EPR. Rather, by rejecting the ‘big bang’ approach to the EPR in favour of a more pragmatic and natural transition, trusts can expect to experience maximum benefits in the long-term and a more seamless and pain-free journey to get there.
Success breeds success This approach is now gaining serious traction with a growing number of UK trusts announcing their decision to deploy EDM technologies to improve patient care by freeing up vital information flow and minimising reliance on paper.
Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust, West Suffolk Hospital NHS Trust and now, most recently, Clatterbridge Centre for Oncology NHS Foundation Trust to name a few, have all standardised on Kainos Evolve™ to deliver on their trust-wide EDM strategies.
Evolve is a comprehensive suite of EDM-based healthcare solutions, which cost-effectively automate the creation, capture,
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Find out more about EDM in healthcare by downloading a FREE copy of the Kainos white paper: W:
www.kainos.com/evolve
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handling and transmission of critical medical casenotes and operational documents and records.
Significantly for these trusts that have embarked on EDM projects, Evolve is a massively scalable EDM solution that addresses the next-generation paper and electronic document demands of trusts.
Critically too, it is based on experience garnered at hundreds of EDM projects, in particular working with Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust. Experience counts here as does good referenceability.
Brendan Major is managing consultant (healthcare) at Kainos
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