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PATIENT SAFETY


Digitally transforming care providers


With the Electronic Prescription Service now reducing paper volumes, the NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) is broadening its service scope to offer competitively priced and comprehensive scanning services to all primary and secondary care organisations in the NHS, to support and enhance digital transformation initiatives. The Clinical Services Journal asks Martin Kelsall, NHSBSA’s director of primary care services, about the impact of this enterprise.


The NHSBSA is an Arm’s Length Body of the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), delivering a range of national services on behalf of the DHSC, NHS England and others. Through delivery of these national services, the authority collects valuable data which is analysed in innovative ways to gain and share insight for the wider NHS. Its goal now is to offer competitively priced and comprehensive scanning services to all primary and secondary care organisations in the NHS, in a bid to support and enhance their digital transformation initiatives. The project will utilise the considerable skills, resources and investment in scanning infrastructure built up over 12 years processing the nation’s paper prescriptions. While volumes have been steadily reducing with the introduction of the Electronic Prescription Service (EPS), processing paper prescription forms and making payments to chemists is still a major workload. Every year, GPs write out 500 million prescription forms with pharmacists dispensing more than 1 billion items. The NHSBSA scans and processes the forms and authorises payments of over £9 bn for these services. Given this, the NHSBSA has become one of the largest scanning bureaus in Europe by volume with a fleet of different document capture solutions able to cope with any scanning job. This includes IBML’s ImageTrac5 scanners and SoftTrac software – designed for


ultrahigh speed document throughput. The NHSBSA will offer NHS Trusts and clinical commissioning groups an end to bespoke document management service which includes: n Collection of documents n Scanning of paperwork in black & white, colour or a mixture (as an option) using Intelligent character recognition software


n Provision of relevant analytics and meta data


n Quality assurance checking n Returning of paper files or secure destruction


The NHSBSA is transitioning from digitising one major paper process – namely prescriptions – and moving to scanning


other paperwork like medical records. Steve Clarke, Alaris


NOVEMBER 2018


n Provision of digital images using encrypted discs, point to point or via a secure cloud service.


To prepare for this, the NHSBSA has rationalised its offices and will be moving to a new 58,663ft2


warehouse facility in


Newcastle to make more efficient use of space. The intention is to reconfigure some of its IBML ImageTrac5 scanners from processing prescriptions – which they currently each do at around 20,000 per hour – so that they can handle other documents. This work is being managed in tandem with IBML’s UK service and support partner, Alaris, a Kodak Alaris business. Steve Clarke, Alaris’ public sector solutions manager, said: “The NHSBSA is transitioning from digitising one major paper process – namely prescriptions – and moving to scanning other paperwork like medical records. It demonstrates the flexibility and capability of IBML capture solutions and how a broader range of documents can be processed.”


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