Kodak Alaris has a long heritage in empowering healthcare providers to streamline their operations, improve data accuracy, and enhance patient care. Read on to discover how Kodak Alaris has already helped several NHS trusts meet their transformation goals
Using scanners from Kodak Alaris to drive unprecedented productivity, St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals Trust digitised more than 135,000 medical records at its two hospital sites, St Helens and Whiston.
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The trust’s primary objective was to improve patient safety and care by improving access to patient records and it also stated a desire to achieve cost savings across time and file storage. Partnering with Kodak Alaris helped the trust achieve £1.4m annual savings from a £1.2m investment.
Kodak Alaris also helped Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals Foundation Trust complete an electronic medical records system to digitise 450,000 patient records. The project delivered savings totalling £1m per year in reduced operating costs and £1.6m per annum in improved efficiencies across the trust.
Digitising medical records
University Hospitals Bristol Foundation Trust had an incredibly large medical records library. In addition to seven large libraries onsite, the trust also had more than 200,000 paper records stored securely off-site.
With nine sites in total, and five different sets of casenotes, UH Bristol’s first objective was to have one core patient record, in one place, rather than a fragment of the record most relevant to an individual discipline or location. The second objective was around quality, making sure that when patients attended hospital, staff could immediately access their records.
Working in partnership, Kodak Alaris and its partner Kainos supported the trust in expanding its in-house scanning capability. A new scanning bureau equipped with 10 scanners from Kodak Alaris was set up and the Kainos Evolve Electronic Medical Record system, deployed.
The starting point was to digitise records on-demand. Prior to a patient attending an elective appointment, the information was scanned and migrated into the Evolve platform. The digital file relating to that hospital was then available to all clinicians who could access it. This allowed each hospital to have its own “go-live”, without impacting records at other sites. At the peak, the trust was scanning about 1.5 million pages a month.
Over the course of the project, UH Bristol invested in two additional scanners, bringing the total to 12. Seven are now utilised full-time, conducting day-forward scanning (scanning of newly created content). The others are dedicated to back scanning old libraries.
The project to go digital has improved patient safety and experience, allowing immediate access to patient records at the point of need. UH Bristol has reduced the potential for records to be misplaced, delays in care through waiting for records to be delivered, as well as the cost of storing physical casenotes, saving time and money that can be reinvested into patient care.
Digitally transforming HR
The decision to relocate the central HR function for Oxford University Hospitals Foundation Trust, was the key driver to digitise all HR records. OUH employs around 13,000 full- and part-time substantive personnel. At any given time, there are also around 2,000 interim, honorary, affiliated and observing specialist staff, both on and off the trust’s payroll, of whom many also have their details stored within the HR records system.
Kodak Alaris’ partner MISL won the tender to digitise the entire HR records archive and specified KODAK i5850S Scanners to power through the bulk scanning of around 13,000 files, each with multiple pages.
Once captured, all of the digital documents were fed into Folding Space Electronic Data & Record Management System. This secure document and records management solution uniquely enables the viewing and presentation of all documents (scanned or digitally created) via a single-screen user experience.
The HR function is now close to a paper-free environment, and the time and cost savings have been significant. Change forms, health and well-being notifications, performance reviews and other communications from managers which used to be sent via the internal post system, are now all received via email and can be seamlessly uploaded into the records system.
The path forward to a simplified process starts with information capture – the cornerstone of effective digital transformation. Solutions from Kodak Alaris can help – to find out more please visit here.
