Bury St Edmunds hospital chooses to deploy Evolve™, Kainos’s flagship integrated EDM solution, to transform efficiency, accuracy and patient care
West Suffolk Hospital NHS Trust is to standardise on Kainos Evolve™, in a further substantial healthcare project win for the electronic document and records management (EDM) solutions specialist.
The Trust, using the Kainos Evolve solution will scan all existing patient notes (approx 250,000 case files with 160+ pages each), within the existing medical records library so that these can be made available electronically to all staff, aiding patient care. All specialties will be included in the roll-out, using a scan-on-demand strategy for clinics. This will promote a structured and controlled project roll-out which will incorporate both in-patient and outpatient services.
Evolve, developed in conjunction with NHS clinicians and underpinned by Autonomy Records Management™, the world’s most advanced retention and disposition solution, is a massively scaleable EDM solution that addresses the next-generation paper and electronic document demands of NHS Trusts across the UK and Ireland.
The initial trigger for the project was the overwhelming volume of patient notes and the storage space they occupied within the Trust, explains Danny Collier, IM&T Project Manager for EDM at the Trust. “We wanted to use the space for clinical purposes, while improving the patient experience. There are also risks associated with manual records handling for our staff, and with the deterioration of notes of a certain age.”
Having a state-of-the-art EDM will improve the patient experience by making notes securely available at any time across all specialties. “This will enable clinicians to access high-quality scanned images of previous episodes of care and view these alongside current episodes. Structured scanning and sophisticated search capability will allow clinicians to add new notes if required and find the information relevant to them,” Danny says.
Kainos was selected to deliver the ambitious project after an extensive tender process. Says Danny, “Kainos proved to the Project Board that it had the commitment and long term vision to support our goals to provide a system that can grow with our expectations and keep improving the patient experience.”
As part of the evaluation process, site visits and shared experience meetings were held with Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust and other Trusts to give the West Suffolk team a broad understanding of what the different suppliers and products offered. Ipswich’s positive experiences of working with Kainos on a similar EDM deployment confirmed that it was the right supplier for the job.
Commenting on the decision to standardise on the Evolve solution, Nick McDonnell, Head of IM&T at the Trust, said, “I saw a supplier who both understood the strategic vision for the NHS and could demonstrate drive and enthusiasm in supporting West Suffolk in implementing the electronic documentation management system. NHS organisations will be expected to deliver more for less through a raft of transformation and efficiency initiatives in the coming years and by working alongside key companies like Kainos we will meet these challenges head on in delivering programmes of change.”
Announcing the project win, Deirdre O’Neill, Head of EDM at Kainos, said, “We look forward immensely to driving through this critical EDM project, which will have a significant impact on patient care and general efficiency at West Suffolk Hospital NHS Trust. We are delighted that another major Trust has chosen to standardise on Evolve.”
