There are just a few more batches to scan before almost half a million medical records will be available electronically and Basildon and Thurrock University hospital (BTUH) will have completed a trust-wide deployment of an electronic medical record (EMR) solution.
Paper medical records for patients at Basildon and Thurrock had originally been stored in five different locations before being moved in 2002 to a central warehouse, three miles from Basildon hospital. The scanning of these files began in July 2010 and the warehouse closed in June this year.
Designed by the clinicians who use it, in conjunction with Fortrus Ltd, users of Unity – the EMR solution at Basildon and Thurrock University hospital – now have concurrent instant access to historic patient records. The solution allows doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals to have 24/7 electronic access to their patients’ medical records. The hospital’s IT department has further enhanced the clinical user experience by integrating the EMR with other clinical systems.
Patient records can be viewed in an episodic context and direct links are provided to pathology and radiology investigations. The trust also focused considerable effort on ensuring that key clinical documents can be located quickly and efficiently, even when relating to the most complex of patient records. This is achieved via smart indexing which uses pattern matching, enabling documents to be automatically recognised.
The system is extremely intuitive, allowing doctors an immediate view of the patient’s records, including all of the relevant medical history, test results and appointment times. The system also significantly improves safety for patients by ensuring that medical records are always available to all of the hospital’s health professionals involved in a patient’s care and treatment.
Significant improvements have been made in the way clinical information is captured, managed, accessed and updated. It means clinicians can access information about patients instantaneously, from multiple locations, including healthcare facilities outside of the hospital.
Unity provides stricter security and access controls than the previous paper-based system and patient confidentiality rules mean that not everyone can see all of the information available for a patient. Safeguards are built into the system to avoid any abuse; for example, there is a permanent record of who has viewed every single page within the system.
The project cost £7m to implement but it is estimated that it will save £1m a year in reduced operating costs and £1.6m a year in improved efficiencies across the trust.
EMR Factfile
• There were 446,610 medical records in the medical records library, containing around 68 million pages
• Each patient record has on average 152 sheets and 304 images
• 3,000 trust and community staff have been trained and have access to Unity, the EMR solution. There are currently 165 concurrent users
• Following the BS1008 accreditation, the medical records have been shredded to produce 300,000 toilet rolls
• As at July 2014, 70% of BTUH outpatient activity was seen via Unity, this equates to 22,000 attendances per month (this will be 100% on completion of all scanning)
• The trust has appointed remote clinical coders to work from home. This was not possible prior to the EMR implementation and BTUH were unable to recruit the appropriate qualified clinical coders
• If Unity had not been implemented, BTUH would today need a warehouse twice the size of Sovereign Park
• If BTUH lined up all the A4 sheets of paper scanned to date this would cover from London to Sydney (50m sheets scanned to date)
