Poole Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has gone live with Kainos’ Evolve electronic document management system to host scanned versions of paper patient records.
Evolve will be embedded into Poole Hospital’s CareCentric electronic patient record, provided by Graphnet, allowing scanned records to be accessed by clinical staff without having to sign into a different system.
The same instance of Evolve also went live at nearby The Royal Bournemouth and Christchurch Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, although without being embedded into the EPR.
The two trusts have a working relationship, including a shared IT department and strategy.
By embedding Evolve in CareCentric, clinicians at Poole will be able view scanned records across all hospitals from both trusts – an important factor considering the significant patient movement across Poole Hospital and The Royal Bournemouth and Christchurch Hospitals.
Clinicians at The Royal Bournemouth and Christchurch Hospitals will also have access to records from Poole, although only via Kainos Evolve.
A spokesperson for Graphnet said that embedding the EDM in the EPR at The Royal Bournemouth and Christchurch “is on the cards”.
Poole Hospital intends to scan its archive of paper notes into the system as well as future paper referrals.
By having Evolve embedded into CareCentric clinicians will be able to view these paper notes alongside information pulled from its CaMIS patient administration system from Ascribe, as well as pathology results, radiology reports, GP referral letters and A&E discharge information.
Graphnet’s director Markus Bolton explained the benefits of embedding an EDM system in an EPR.
“Our experience is that clinicians are much more likely to view information if it is integrated with single sign-on and can be viewed within patient context.”
Rupert Page, consultant neurologist and chief clinical information officer at Poole Hospital, added: “The ability to move seamlessly between native electronic and scanned documents such as external correspondence, and to do so locked in patient context, is essential for clinical safety – particularly when seeing large numbers of patients as in an outpatient setting.”
Poole Hospital went live with an upgraded version of the CareCentric software from in March last year. The new software allows improved integration with IT systems in use across the health economy.