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IT & WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS
Using technology to increase patient record accuracy
Gordon Robinson, service manager of outpatients and medical records at Warrington and Halton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, discusses the paperless NHS in practice. Graham Jarvis reports.
M
edical treatment blunders could cost the NHS £17.5bn – or one-seventh
of the organisation’s annual budget – in compensation pay-outs, according to one 2013 press report, which noted an 11% rise in negligence complaints from 2012-13.
Health secretary Jeremy Hunt hopes to stem the tide of litigation cases by promoting the need to make the service paperless by 2018. He hopes this will improve the accuracy of patient records, and save clinicians and their trusts both time and money – “billions of hours”, he was quoted as saying – allowing nurses to spend more time with patients by allowing them to save time on filling in paper-based forms from behind their nursing stations, for example.
Hunt also argued in a Guardian interview that a paperless NHS will “save thousands of lives [and] a lot of safety problems in the NHS – people being prescribed with the wrong medication, and ‘never events’ where people have the wrong arm amputated – it’s wrong to say that technology is the panacea but it can make a big, big difference.”
Patient access Patients, for example, will be able to access
90 | national health executive Sep/Oct 14
their own records. With the touch of a button the plan hopes to enable medical practitioners across the NHS to share digital patient records. A wide range of people will be able to do this, from people working in social services to ambulance workers and hospital consultants. As Hunt has put it, banks ensure people are confident that their money is safe – surely the NHS can do the same for privacy?
Mixed progress
How close are we to creating a paperless NHS? Gordon Robinson, service manager of outpatients and medical records at Warrington & Halton Hospitals NHS FT, says progress is mixed.
“Different trusts have tackled this in different ways, and some are behind others,” he said. GP practices have led the way in the transition from paper to electronic records. Compared to the digital world of primary care, some hospital trusts are planning only to digitise their paper record archives – this offers cheaper medical record storage, but not an absolutely paperless NHS.
“Primary care is in the lead and some acute hospitals are not far behind, but the biggest challenges come for community trusts, as
some are a long way behind,” he explained. This is perhaps because it’s easier to control such a project as making records management paperless within large hospital trusts.
Hospitals are multi-disciplinary, but they use one record for patients who access the service.
At Robinson’s trust, only one case note folder is used per patient. This means that if you go as a patient to urology, the same record is used as if you had gone to cardiology. “This is much more centralised in a hospital or GP practice, so much easier to implement than in large community trusts operating from hundreds of venues, with multiple small teams where a single paper record folder system would be almost impossible to implement,” he said.
Standardising records
“Standardised stationery means we just have to replicate electronically what’s in the record today,” Robinson said. Traditionally there would be one paper record for each patient, making efficient and simultaneous access across a number of people more difficult to achieve. He nevertheless thinks that while community services would benefit from the paperless solutions offered by companies such as Kofax, which he has worked with at this
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