Northampton General Hospital begins digital medical records project

Northampton General Hospital NHS Trust has started a major project to digitise its medical records which will improve clinician access.

By fully digitising the patient record, the trust hopes to deliver mobile clinical decision-making support to its healthcare professionals which will improve the care it offers patients. It will also ensure that Northampton is aligned with its sister organisation, Kettering General Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

The project is part of a 10-year digital transformation plan from University Hospitals Northamptonshire NHS Group, which includes Northampton and Kettering hospitals.

More than 200,000 medical records will be securely scanned into IMMJ System’s MediViewer, an electronic document management system (EDMS). In addition, the trust will use its existing in-house scanning service to manage the day forward scanning operation, which will be supported by IMMJ Systems.

The project is led by group chief digital information officer for University Hospitals Northamptonshire NHS Group, Andy Callow. He said: “Our ambition is to be the leading digital hospital group in England.

“Achieving that would mean clinicians are given excellent tools that provides more time to care, patients are in control of their treatment, managers have instant information to drive decision-making and all staff have access to amazing training and support. Starting to scan paper records at Northampton General is something we’ve been looking forward to as it is a significant milestone on our journey.”

The project includes implementing IMMJ System’s MediViewer, to provide a platform to store scanned medical records. Clinical and clerical users will be able to view a complete history for trust patients. The SmartIndexing technology classifies information in real time and will allow free text search through the record to locate key clinical documents.

The technology can also ingest a range of clinical feeds with the MediViewer API and architecture helping to centralise patient information.

Jamie Hall, head of sales at IMMJ Systems, said: “This is a critical milestone for the trust and for its ambitions to be the most digitally advanced hospital group in the country, with secure, resilient, accurate and timely information at the point of patient care.

The digitisation of the trust’s medical records, and integration with clinical systems and document feeds, will deliver not only huge clinical benefits but will also help the trust deliver many cash releasing and operational benefits from the implementation of EDMS technology. It brings Kettering and Northampton General Hospitals together as part of the group realising the benefits of using the same document management platform.”

The trust went live with the project in March 2022, starting in its neurology/rehab services. Phase one included ingesting Northampton’s clinic letters from an existing system. It is now working on integrations, feeds and contextual launches with other clinical applications.