When Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust needed to save enough time for two members of staff to focus on other tasks, it turned to Restore Information Management’s Auto-Ordering system.
The customer
Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust is one of the region’s busiest providers of healthcare, providing services to a growing population of 744,000 people.
Those services range from cancer treatment and emergency care to paediatrics and physiotherapy, provided from five sites: East Surrey Hospital, The Earlswood Centre, Caterham Dene Hospital, Crawley Hospital, , The Earlswood Centre, Caterham Dene Hospital, Crawley Hospital, and Horsham Hospital. Together, these sites treat 100,000 patients in the emergency department, provide 400,000 outpatient appointments, and deliver 5,000 babies!
Ordering the notes for all those patients had been a time-consuming process for the trust’s records management team. But we’d invented a system to save that team a lot of time.
The trust had started working with Restore Information Management in 2014 to securely store over 700,000 records in one of our local, secure facilities. Since then, the trust had fully switched to Electronic Patient Records (EPRs) for new patients in 2022. But there were no plans to digitise the paper notes for existing patients.
That meant the records management team, led by Becky Tomlinson, would continue placing manual orders for those paper notes. And while we’ve made it quick and easy to order any record from our storage facilities, even quick and easy can become time-consuming when you’re ordering hundreds of records every day.
“We had two members of staff ordering records, spending about five to six hours a day on it,” Becky estimated, “because there’s quite a lot of cross-checking, placing the order, going on the portal, updating our case note tracking systems.”
Ordering the patient notes was undeniably vital work for the trust. But if it took five to six hours a day, that time couldn’t be spent on other tasks that needed doing too. Ideally, Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust needed a way to order hundreds of patient notes in less time than it takes to say “Surrey and Sussex NHS Healthcare Trust.”
Luckily, we’d been working on just the thing.
We realised that NHS staff were typing out patient details twice: once when booking an appointment, and again to order the notes from storage. So we designed our Auto-Ordering system, which would create a link between your systems and ours to automatically order patient notes when an appointment was booked.
No more manual entry. No more cross-checking. No risk of accidentally typing the wrong number and sending the wrong notes to an appointment.
Even better, our Auto-Ordering system is customisable. Becky could set up rules to determine when, where, and how records are delivered based on anything from appointment type or speciality to the location of the appointment.
Becky chose to base her rules on the clinicians preferences. “Some want the history, others don’t,” she told us, “The Auto-Ordering system is very good because we can put those rules in; we can base it on their requirements. And we can change them at any time. It’s very easy.”
Automating a process is never without its risks, so we took every step to make sure Auto-Ordering wasn’t going to leave a clinician without a record. We ran multiple tests, checking dummy orders against the actual orders Becky’s team was placing to make sure Auto-Ordering was getting everything right.
These tests turned up a surprising cataloguing error: when moving from older systems, the trust had incorrectly numbered some patient notes, meaning a number of patients had two of the same “volume” of notes. And individuals on Becky’s team hadn’t seen enough of these duplicates to appreciate how big the problem was. “There were thousands! I was worried we’d have to manually correct every single one,” Becky admitted. “But the Restore team did something clever in the background and corrected the data.” Now the trust is no longer unknowingly ordering multiple volumes when only one was needed, it’s saving even more money!
Finally, we made sure that implementing Auto-Ordering didn’t disrupt the trust’s services in any way. “We didn’t have to do anything physically on site and we didn’t have to make any changes,” Becky told us. “And the follow-up care has been very good. We knew if we had a question or an issue, we could go to our account manager, or our implementation manager, who’s brilliant. We knew someone would help. But it was all very smooth. I don’t remember implementation day; it just happened in the background.”
The trust had already saved space by choosing to store records in our local, secure off-site facilities: the trust had been able to reduce five on-site libraries to just one, creating space for clinical areas such as a pharmacy area and an X-Ray suite.
Auto-Ordering helped the trust save time. A lot of time. With manual orders needed only for the occasional legal, audit, or research need, Becky could reassign two staff members to other duties; more productivity for the same headcount!
And Auto-Ordering helped the trust save money: the speed of Auto-Ordering meant more records were making it onto the first daily delivery. The second daily delivery became small enough that the trust could drop it entirely.
Auto-Ordering will support the trust’s transition to digital, too. “When the time comes where we stop using paper, we’ll just change our requirement in Auto-Ordering,” Becky said. “Instead of delivering it, just send it by Scan on Demand.”
- Customer since 2014
- Over 730,000 records in storage
- 4 on-site libraries converted in clinical space
- 3,000 records delivered a month on average
- 2 daily deliveries from local facility reduced to 1
- 1000s of duplicate volumes identified and recatalogued, saving on delivery costs
- 13 hours saved every day
- 2 staff members were allocated more time to focus on other tasks
Case Studies
