Lancashire Teaching Hospitals digitises patient casenotes

11 October 2013

Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has deployed the Kainos Evolve EMR system to digitise patient records across seven medical specialties.

The system automates the creation, capture and handling of the full medical casenote including, historical casenote, clinical results, operational documentation, and electronic forms. Its end-to-end functionality, which includes eDischarge capabilities, ensures reliable information flow between hospitals and community services such as GP practices.

Lancashire Teaching Hospitals opted for a ‘scan on demand’ approach to digitising patient records, creating its own in-house scanning bureau. In advance of outpatient appointments, or directly following new admissions, paper notes are scanned into the Evolve system so that all of the latest information is available on PCs or laptops to consultants in clinics, in surgery, on wards and in the community. In time, mobile users may move to tablets.

Janet Young, Business Improvement and Performance Manager at the Trust, and the business lead for the case-note digitisation programme, explains Lancashire’s ambitions, “Initially we were looking for a straightforward scanning and digitisation solution so we could move away from paper patient records, but as we refined our needs we realised we needed more intelligent casenotes, to give consultants the latest clinical information at their fingertips and avoid the risk of patients’ visits being cancelled due to missing casenotes and offering our clinical teams an intelligent patient record.”

The Trust plans to add eForms and workflow capabilities to prevent the creation of new paper. Workflows will include system flags to support clinical decision making, ensuring that actions can be taken promptly. The system is also being further integrated with the Trust’s EPR QuadraMed.

 

To top