Ipswich Trust moving to 'paper-lite' environment

Ipswich Hospitals NHS Trust has begun a major project to transform some 500,000 sets of paper case notes into an online and fully-searchable system for clinicians.

“This is fairly new for the healthcare world – taking legacy records like this, some of which go back 40 or 50 years, and turning them into content that can be accessed and searched like this,” its head of Programme Delivery in the Trust's Information Management and Technology, Neil Turnbull told PublicTechnology.net.

Ipswich is a large (45 acre) district hospital, meaning documents attached to a patient's journey may have to be transported around the site or retrieved from storage. The new system – developed by Belfast based IT services company specialising in content, knowledge and document management projects called Kainos, and incorporating the Autonomy search engine – is in contrast a complete Electronic Document and Records Management solution, argued Turnbull.

“Now these notes can be looked at over a secure SAN instead by if need be multiple clinicians remotely,” he said.

This will lead to significant time and cost savings, as on average 20 sets of notes cannot be found in time at an average of £1,500 per episode, a potential loss of income of £30,000 minimum each month. In august 2009, for example, 60 sets of such misplaced notes took over five days to find in August alone, while one set of notes in February last year was so poorly filed it took 5.5 hours to code instead of 30 minutes.

Apart from the legacy notes capture – about 20,000 are now in the system - all new case notes are also now being created electronically and 70%+ of discharge summaries are delivered to GP surgeries within 24 hours because of the software, he added.

Other benefits include the option of freeing up the space that used to be devoted to archival of all the paper for other uses.

The software will now be offered to other Trusts by the two suppliers as a package to be dubbed Evolve.

The suppliers point out that the system is not a new form of EPR (Electronic Patient Record) system as per the NPfIT and Lorenzo but acts as a supplement to such a system.

It involves a scanning process for electronic record conversion, a central repository for storage, and a portal for viewing the records and other patient correspondence, meaning all scanned electronic patient case notes, both historic and on-going, are automatically indexed and stored in a single location for easy and secure access.

However, Turnbull believes there will always be a place for paper in medicine and the ultimate goal is less a paper-less Trust, more a “paper-lite” one.