County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust has bought an electronic document management system from Civica.
The trust, which aims to be paperless by 2015, will implement the WinDIP system in a ten-year partnership with the company.
Diane Murphy, the trusts clinical director of service transformation and project sponsor, said this is the next step in the trust’s paperless strategy. “Patient records are at the heart of what we do,” she said.
“Being able to provide our clinicians and administrative staff with the information they need at the touch of a button will transform the way patients are treated, and help us make huge savings in the years to come.”
Earlier this year, the trust signed a ten year contract worth up to £20m with TNT for its scanning services and health records management, as part of the trust’s electronic document management project.
The project also includes a ‘scan on demand’ service, which enables TNT to pick and scan a patient’s record when the patient visits an outpatient clinic or is admitted to hospital.
Civica’s WinDIP system allows the records that have been scanned to be viewed by relevant staff members from any location in the hospital.
The system ensures that patient information is accurate, up-to-date and easily accessible, stored in a secure environment.
When a patient in clinic is referred to a different department within the trust, clinicians can instantly access the records on the EDM system, speeding up the treatment process.
The WinDIP software is used in 50 NHS trusts across the country and Durham and Darlington hopes the system will reduce transport, storage and administrative costs, as well as reducing the risk of losing patient records.