Glasgow “Super Hospital” Takes Paperless Lead

The new South Glasgow University Hospital has been called a “catalyst” for a paperless healthcare system.

The hospital opened on 27^th April this year with 1109 en-suite patient rooms all equipped with Freeview, radio and Wi-Fi.

Over 10,000 staff are based on-site and each were equipped with a mobile device when they began working at the hospitals.

Head of IT at NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde Robin Wright told Digital Health News that the hospital is specifically built to adopt technology as the norm.

“The new hospital has been a particular catalyst because it was built without record storage facilities and we didn’t make assumptions about paper being part of the equation,” Wright claimed.

“We’ve still got some paper we would rather not have, but we’re working through those issues,” he added.

A number of “cornerstone” systems underpin the use of technology within the hospital to help it promote paperless as the standard way of working.

It is using InterSystems’ TrackCare as a patient administration system and for order communications and some clinical correspondence, while an Orion portal is the main component in delivering Electronic Patient Records (EPRs).

Meanwhile, paper notes are not routinely used in outpatients and instead records are place on the clinical portal which has around 26,000 views a day.

“The clinical portal is the default medium for accessing patient records and on the back of that we’re now starting to withdraw paper and reduce dependency on case notes,” claimed Wright.

Building Paperless Into The Future

However, there is still work to be done before the South Glasgow University Hospital is completely paperless.

The organisation’s plans for the future include e-prescribing, electronic nursing documentation, and adding GP data into the portal.

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