Ipswich chooses Kainos for casenotes

Kainos has signed a £1m contract with Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust to convert its paper casenotes into electronic format using its electronic document records management solution (EDRM).

The contract which includes licences for the core software Meridio EDRM and autonomy scanning and services for the development and implementation of the system, will see trust staff manage the scanning of 500,000 casenotes over the next five years.

The trust, which is set to go-live with the system on November 30th in the specialist elective surgery ward, will initially scan 40,000 ‘high priority’ existing patient casenotes and casenotes of those who have recently registered at the trust.

Neil Turnbull, head of programme delivery at the trust, told E-Health Insider: “The first phase of the project will concentrate on the viewing of historical casenotes.

“It is possible to annotate these notes but the original version of the document as scanned will always be retained and linked to the annotated version. New notes made during an admission or clinic attendance will be sent back to the scanning bureau and added to the electronic record within 24 hours.”

The trust has set-up a scanning bureau in-house to reduce the risk of sending notes off-site, which may be needed in an emergency.

The bureau is operated by eight members of staff taken from the existing medical records library who will rotate between casenote preparation, scanning and quality assurance.

The trust awarded the contract in April 2009 after using the Catalist procurement model and collating the opinions of more than 400 members of the trust’s clinical and administrative staff.

Its early ambitions in implementing the EDRM were focused on reducing reliance on paper-based casenotes and enabling multi-user access.

However, the key driver of the project became to meet the April 2010 deadline to ensure that patient discharge summaries can be delivered to GPs within 24 hours of discharge.

Turnbull added: “With a library of over half a million case notes scanning of historical records will be taking place for many years to come.

“However, by April 2010, the Electronic Document and Records Management System will be the primary way of viewing patients’ case notes and 95% of discharge summaries will be produced from the system.”

The trust said that the EDRM is not a replacement for an electronic patient record and that it is currently working with CSC to plan the implementation of Lorenzo Regional Care and would be looking to exploit the opportunities for integration.

Deirdre O’Neill, head of Enterprise Content Management at Kainos, said: “Over time the EDRM solution at Ipswich will become a trust-wide system upon which clinicians and other hospital staff will come to rely on for effective and efficient patient care.”

“Projects such as these are non trivial and Kainos is acutely aware of the massive cultural change that will be required by The Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust for this project to be a success.”

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