Sector: NHS & Healthcare
London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust is one of the largest integrated care trusts in the country, providing hospital and community services to the people of Brent, Ealing, Harrow and beyond. The trust was formed by the merger of North West London Hospitals NHS Trust and Ealing Hospital NHS Trusts in October 2014.
As well as delivering community services across the three London boroughs, the Trust provides acute hospital services at:
- Central Middlesex Hospital
- Ealing Hospital
- Northwick Park Hospital
- St Mark’s Hospital.
In December 2017, the Trust was officially named a ‘university teaching hospital’ in recognition of the important role they play in training clinicians of the future and bringing the benefits of research to the public.
Challenge
In March 2020 the Trust’s patient records were all paper based and held in four libraries across the estate, as well as a significant number of records held in offsite storage. Discussions had been ongoing for some time around digital transformation for one of the libraries, but then COVID-19 hit and presented considerable challenges for the Trust with the reliance on paper records. With the increased pressure on healthcare that COVID-19 caused, the Trust accelerated their plans to digitise their medical records to enable Virtual Outpatient Clinics. Virtual Clinics would help to reduce the risk of infection for outpatients, whilst at the same time reducing the risk of contamination created by moving paper records around the Trust.
Solution
Driven by Sonia Patel, CIO of the Trust at the time and now CIO at NHSX, in conjunction with IMMJ Systems MediViewer, the service to scan medical records provided by Restore Digital was up and running in just 6 weeks, as opposed to the originally planned 6 months project timeframe.
The Trust chose Restore Digital to partner on this project due to their long-standing partnership with EDM Group, who were acquired by Restore Digital in 2021. EDM had provided electronic document management services (EDMS) to the Trust for several years prior to the project, so the Trust were confident they were working with a company which also provide the right levels of governance around the data and digital security.
Mary Cahill | Associate Director Digital Services
Restore has been the Trust's Medical Records archive provider for many years but in the past four years have worked in partnership with the Trust to digitize records and close the medical record libraries across Central Middlesex and St. Mark's Hospitals, which has saved us huge amounts of cost and space of storing paper records. Over the past two years Restore have worked closely with our Medical Records and Project Management teams, and our EDRMS provider IMMJ to implement scanning within the Trust. They provide a professional, supportive and quality service.
Results
The Trust originally planned to digitise the majority of their outpatient records over 6 months, and then move on to accelerate the Trusts digital transformation programme by digitising all active patient records over 3 years.
Following further planning the approach was revised to scan patients on the waiting list, and scan on discharge concentrating mainly on Northwick Park, whilst the EDMS was rolled out to more specialties and the other hospitals. Since the start of the digital transformation project, the first batch of records scanned by the end of May 2020 had already hit 50 million images.
The project will deliver significant improvements in patient care, by improving speedier access to patient information from a clinical aspect, and significant reductions in on-going costs associated with the management of paper records.
A major digital transformation project of this type requires a true partnership approach, with the Trust, the EDMS supplier and Restore working in collaboration from the start.
Restore's ability to respond in a short time frame with a secure scanning service for outpatient clinics has been a phenomenal effort and played a major part in enabling us to respond more effectively to the COVID-19 emergency. We are now embarking on a digital journey that will transform the way we work, by providing our clinicians instant access to patient records electronically, which will reduce risk and ultimately improve patient care
Sonia Patel | CIO
Jamie Hall | Head of Sales, IMMJ Systems
We have found Restore to be very professional and easy to work with. Our project management and technical teams have worked well together to find solutions for any issues as they come across them to deliver the best solution for the Trust. We now have a joint solution that can be readily applied to other digitisation projects, and we look forward to working with Restore on future contracts within the NHS
Key Facts
- over 3 years active patient records
- 50 million scanned images