St Helens NHS Trust - Using digital records as a platform for better patient care
- Summary:
- As director of informatics at the NHS Trust, Christine Walters, is getting doctors and nurses to use their keyboards and away from mounds of paper.
As director of informatics at the Trust, Christine Walters manages a shared informatics service that provides technology to a range of organisations, including two hospitals, a mental health trust, GP practices and local councils. Walters says she engages with senior business peers and clinical staff to implement technology that changes healthcare for the better:
To be successful at leading an IT organisation, you need to have a visionary board that is prepared to invest in technology and which recognises what it can do. The key to being successful as a CIO in healthcare is that you need to have a genuine passion for the role.
Walters was appointed to her board-level position at the end of September 2015 and continues to push digital transformation at the Trust. One of the key foundation technologies supporting this work is an electronic document management system (EDMS). The Trust first implemented a customised version of CCube Solutions’ EDMS in 2010, becoming the first NHS organisation to stop using paper records in operational practice. Walters has overseen the recent system improvement to CCube EDMS v.4, which provides a range of benefits:
We’re the first Trust in the country to run the upgrade and it’s made a big difference. The new version offers better workflows for our staff as they move towards a paperless future. There’s also a focus on structured data collection because there’s no point in just bringing together information without strong categorisation. The new system supports better forms of data analysis and has been designed to work across a range of mobile devices and operating systems.
About 130,000 medical records were digitised at the time the EDMS was originally implemented around the turn of the decade, which produced £1.4 million in annual savings for the Trust. Walters says the updated version of the platform enables her team to meet the aim of delivering electronic health records to the point of care in every setting to every patient. She says the reason EDMS is helping to produce such clear benefits for the Trust and its patients is due to strong organisational buy-in:
The system was designed and built with the clinicians in a way that suits how they want to work. I think that’s a key lesson to be learnt from an EMDS implementation. It’s very easy to go on the web and find lots of healthcare IT failures and it’s not so easy to find the success stories. I can honestly say that in the two years I’ve been here, we haven’t had one email about the EDMS system – and usually your in-box is a good barometer of how your system is performing.
Benefits
Walters says EDMS has helped in three key areas – clinical engagement, efficient and robust processes around the scanning of paper, and providing information to staff in a timely manner. She says the associated implementation of a scanning bureau at the Trust has helped staff to move away from a reliance on paper and towards a recognition that digital transformation can help boost organisational effectiveness:
Any paper that is generated, we collect if from the wards twice a day and it’s scanned and available for clinicians and patients within 24 hours. That fast turnaround means our clinicians know that the information is going to be available to them when they go into the EDM and they know it will be up to date. The system is not just about scanning paper, either. It’s a solution to help us capture results, investigations and any reports. It’s provided a confidence factor for staff, who all use the system – it’s the first port of call clinicians go to look for patient information.
The EDMS mirrors the old paper medical file and displays key information, such as patient name, appointment time and last doctor’s letter. The information in the system is organised in a series of 140-or-so chapters that help clinicians delve into a patient’s medical history quickly. During the EDMS implementation process, more than 500 doctors and 130 medical secretaries were trained, with the technology gradually rolled out over 22 months. Walters says clinical staff have been crucial to the introduction of EDMS:
The system was designed by them and for them. I’ve been to hospitals all over the country and I think the Trust now benefits from the most efficient scanning bureau I’ve seen. When you walk around the hospital, there’s hardly any paper because new information is scanned as quickly as possible. The whole process is very impressive.
A broader scope
Walters says development work around EDMS has provided the foundation for a broader digital transformation across the Trust. She refers, for example, to the recently introduced electronic modified early warning system (EMEWS), which helps alert clinical staff to the patients that require priority treatment. When a patient is discharged from hospital, their observational information is automatically placed in the EDMS and is immediately available for other healthcare organisations in the Trust, such as GPs. New systems like EMEWS, says Walters, are linked to – and integrated with – the EDMS:
It’s enabled us to bring in new technology much more easily because clinical staff are used to working with the services every day. One of the hardest things to do when you bring in electronic patient records is to get the clinicians to stop using paper and to start using keyboards.
Work on creative solutions to business challenges continues apace. Walters is currently developing the business case for the introduction of a ‘smart apps’ development team. The initiative will focus on the creation of applications for phones and tablets that help with issues of patient management, such as directing people to the right services at the right time. Once again, Walters says this type of innovation is being considered because the shared service supports joined-up thinking:
A collective and collaborative approach allows us to think about areas of innovation that might otherwise be outside the remit of an individual hospital. It’s a very exciting project. I hope we are going to get the funding. We’re trying to build a business case that both demonstrates the benefits and justifies the investment.