Belfast-headquartered Kainos has secured a contract with West Suffolk Hospital NHS Trust to provide an electronic documents solution that will scan all existing patient notes – some 250,000 case files of 160 pages each – and make them available to all professional staff.
All specialties will be included in the roll-out, using a scan-on-demand strategy for clinics. This will promote a structured and controlled project rollout, which will incorporate both in-patient and outpatient services.
Kainos’ Evolve system, developed in conjunction with NHS clinicians and underpinned by Autonomy Records Management, the world’s most advanced retention and disposition solution, is a massively scaleable EDM solution that addresses the next-generation paper and electronic document demands of NHS Trusts.
The initial trigger for the project was the overwhelming volume of patient notes and the storage space they occupied within the Trust, explains Danny Collier, IM&T Project Manager for EDMS at the Trust.
“We wanted to use the space for clinical purposes, while improving the patient experience. There are also risks associated with manual records handling for our staff, and with the deterioration of notes of a certain age,” Collier explained.
Having a state-of-the-art EDMS will improve the patient experience by making notes securely available at any time across all specialties.
“This will enable clinicians to access high-quality scanned images of previous episodes of care and view these alongside current episodes. Structured scanning and sophisticated search capability will allow clinicians to add new notes if required and find the information relevant to them,” Danny says.
Kainos was selected to deliver the ambitious project after an extensive tender process. Says Danny: “Kainos proved to the Project Board that it had the commitment and long-term vision to support our goals to provide a system that can grow with our expectations and keep improving the patient experience.”
As part of the evaluation process, site visits and shared experience meetings were held with Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust and other Trusts to give the West Suffolk team a broad understanding of what the different suppliers and products offered. Ipswich’s positive experiences of working with Kainos on a similar EDMS deployment confirmed that it was the right supplier for the job.
“I saw a supplier who both understood the strategic vision for the NHS and could demonstrate drive and enthusiasm in supporting West Suffolk in implementing the electronic documentation management system,” Nick McDonnell, Head of IM&T at the Trust, said.
“NHS organisations will be expected to deliver more for less through a raft of transformation and efficiency initiatives in the coming years and by working alongside key companies like Kainos we will meet these challenges head on in delivering programmes of change.”
Announcing the project win, Deirdre O’Neill, head of ECM at Kainos, said: “We look forward immensely to driving through this critical EDMS project, which will have a significant impact on patient care and general efficiency at West Suffolk Hospital NHS Trust.”
