Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust has implemented a new medical search engine to give clinicians “quicker and more efficient” access to scanned patient data.
The trust is the first to use a medical search engine called HealthView that was developed by enterprise search specialist Mongoose.
Mid Yorkshire has made a substantial investment in new hospitals and infrastructure over the past three years.
In 2009, eHealth Insider reported that as part of its redevelopment work it was looking to remove the need for a records warehouse by scanning around 2m records and converting their contents to digital files.
It has been working with Mongoose to give clinicians better access to the files held in its document management system, and to open up cardiology reports that were previously held in a database that was inaccessible to them.
Paul Curley, clinical director for IT and a consultant surgeon at Mid Yorkshire Hospitals, told eHealth Insider that the trust deployed the search engine because clinicians were struggling to retrieve information from the scanned patient data.
“We are trying to leverage all the investment we have made in scanning our paper records and ensure that our clinicians have the utmost confidence that they can find the information they are looking for,” he said.
“This will provide us with plenty of advantages and benefits including the potential to look up specific information regarding to a patient or a group of patients such as who has received metal on metal hip replacements.”
HealthView is a Microsoft FAST-based system that consolidates the records held on an individual patient for searching and viewing through a single, secure, web-based access point. Clinicians can access this on tablet devices such as iPads.
It “sucks in patient information” and allows it to be presented in different ways so that, for example, clinicians can find patients who have upcoming appointments or who have been seen or discharged.
Clinicians can also conduct specific searches on a patient’s healthcare background, for example highlighting possible drug allergies that have been mentioned in the patient correspondence.
The one big limitation of HealthView is that it can only locate patient data on the scanned paper records that have been typed; and not those that have been handwritten.
“The technology represents great promise for enhancing individual patient care, as well as for auditing and research purposes,” said Curley.
“It is not dissimilar to Google in the way it uses optical character recognition and clever algorithms. It is saving clinicians an incredible amount of time and they no longer have to look through thumbnails of patients to find key information relating to their care.”
Mongoose is also the search specialist for NHS Evidence, provided by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. It was recently named as a “cool vendor” by Gartner.