Patient Care Set To Improve At Princess Royal University Hospital

King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust will be implementing a digital care records system at Princess Royal University Hospital (PRUH) to improve patient care and become paper light.

The Trust acquired PRUH in October 2013 after the formal dissolution of South London Healthcare NHS Trust.

However, a Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspection at the Hospital identified historical problems with the availability of medical records, which led to repeat cancellations of outpatient appointments.

King’s College Trust then turned to specialist systems and business process services provider Civica to help it implement a digital care records system that would not only move it towards its paperless NHS goals, but also greatly improve patient care in the process.

Civica will be providing the Trust with its WinDIP electronic document management (EDM) solution alongside a third party scanning solution with the aim of building upon and existing and highly function electronic patient record (EPR) solution.

King’s College NHS hopes this will allow clinicians to obtain patient information from one central location, as well as assisting its vision of integrated health and social care.

The solution is expected to save the Trust around £700,000 over the next two years and equip it with the facilities it needs to become paper light.

The Trust is also using the Civica EDM solution to complete its digital transformation as it still stores a number of historical paper documents.

It aims to bring PRUH up to speed and then begin processing historical documents through WinDIP which will fully integrated with the EPR system, alongside the hospitals’ A&E Symphony system and other key clinical systems.

Benefits For Staff And Patients Alike

“The new enlarged organisation is focused on providing first rate care for patients, new and exciting opportunities for staff and a strong operational and financial position to continually improve services,” claimed director of ICT at the King’s College Trust Colin Sweeney.

“This programme furthers these aims. From the patient record point of view, navigating an easy-to-use system is far more preferable to physically tracking down and collecting paper files.

“The Civica technology will deliver significant savings from a time perspective but it also has far-reaching consequences for patient care. After all, consider the challenge of treating people properly if you can’t find their notes,” he added.

The new systems have already been piloted in the dental and ophthalmology departments in the Sidcup-based Queen Mary’s Hospital and they will be gradually rolled out across the whole organisation by February 2016.

When the programme is fully deployed, all patient records will be held within the WinDIP platform and become available with the push of a button.

The Trust will also use Civica eForms and Workflow technology to put new data into the system and trigger intelligent workflows.

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