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10/06/2014 16:15
PrintIT
talks to Mark O’Herlihy, director of
healthcare EMEA at Perceptive Software,
about how the Lexmark company is helping
the NHS become paper-lite
Medical
scans
The £2 billion funding black
hole revealed by NHS England
underlines the importance of
implementing more efficient
processes in the NHS. As it
aims to reduce costs, one of
the NHS’s biggest challenges
is the establishment of a
paper-lite environment by
bringing together all medical
images at point of need
and consolidating medical
records including paper-based
archives.
Perceptive Software, a
Lexmark company, offers a
portfolio of solutions that can
help healthcare providers
achieve this aim by implementing
vendor neutral archives for
medical images, medical records
and associated documents.
Mark O’Herlihy, founder
of Accuo Technologies, which
Lexmark acquired three years
ago, and now director of
healthcare EMEA at Perceptive
Software, says that the NHS
has made progress in improving
access to medical images, but
much work still remains to be
done.
“In 2000, the typical
environment was paper-based
and had one core system called
the hospital information system,
which is where patients were
booked in. Everything else was
captured on local systems – it
could be a pathology system, a
radiology system, a PACS system.
All of that content was very good
but it was in its own silo and
wasn’t available throughout the
hospital,” he said.
“In 2014, we haven’t moved
on very much, in that we still
have lots of paper, lots of
medical records, lots of silos.
But we do have a much better
enterprise approach because
today we have electronic
medical records in some
hospitals, which are supposed
to be the dashboard that
commissioners and clinical
users use to view all data about
a patient in that hospital.
“The challenge they come
up against is that local systems
are unable to connect to that
enterprise system because they
are proprietary in nature or
because they don’t understand
how to move information around
the hospital. What Perceptive
Software provides is the glue, the
integration point.”
It does this by providing a
middleware platform that sits
between a hospital’s existing
applications and end users,
allowing them to view all
content in context. Unlike many
of its competitors, Perceptive
Software also integrates non-
clinical applications like invoice
processing and billing, potentially
making all that information
available to the clinician.
Improved data sharing
O’Herlihy says that every
hospital is at a different stage of
automation, but they all have a
desire to improve data sharing,
which Perceptive Software can
achieve in a number of ways.
For example, it is providing
Salisbury, Wight and South
Hampshire Trust with a hosted
solution for all medical imaging
in its hospitals, which allows
the Portsmouth, Southampton,
Isle of Wight and Salisbury NHS
Trusts to look across the region
and have a single view of all the
medical imaging (x-rays, CTs,
dermatology images etc.) for a
patient without having to go into
every single application.
In Nottingham, it has already
installed a consolidated imaging
archive for radiology images held
by different hospitals and is now
providing a capture solution so
that they can capture all medical
records within the same vendor-
neutral archive. The ultimate
goal is to have a single point of
access for all their information.
O’Herlihy says that despite
new funding, including Safer
Hospitals, Safer Wards released
last year by NHS England,
hospitals are unlikely to meet
Jeremy Hunt’s target to make
digital care records paperless
by 2018. “A more reasonable
target is to be fully paperless by
2021, but most trusts expect to
be paper-lite by 2018,” he says.
One reason medical record
digitisation is taking so long is
that digitising records is a very
manual, time-consuming process,
albeit one that can be speeded
up by using Perceptive Software
solutions to categorise and index
content, whether scanning is
done in-house or outsourced.
“The hospital can either
digitise medical records
themselves or outsource it.
If the latter, we can put our
software on top to categorise
the documents as they
come through. We do all the
categorisation, lifting the content
and indexing it. Then, once it’s
categorised and indexed, they
can use our system to access it
locally,” he said.
Another reason is that
budgets tend to be focused on
high throughput environments
like radiology or pathology.
“Areas like medical records
and administration don’t
generally have the funding to be
able to undertake these multi-
million pound initiatives and see
the savings in it. The NHS isn’t
focused on Spend to Save, it is
just focused on Save. They could
put a business case together
saying if we spend £3 million,
we will save £10 million over five
years, but today it’s all about
saving £5 million now and not
spending money,” he said.
Perceptive Software may
not be able to overturn this
culture but it can certainly
help organisations make
the case for change. It has
numerous reference sites
demonstrating the benefits of
its vendor neutral archives and
experienced consultants that can
recommend the best solution
from its extensive document
management portfolio. Solutions
can be acquired direct or through
one of the many frameworks
Perceptive Software is part of.
To find out more, please
visit
co.uk
.
