Pennine NHS Trust Selects Kainos Evolve? EMR to Boost Patient Safety

The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust has selected the Evolve EMR (electronic medical records) platform from digital technology solutions company Kainos together with data capture services from EDM Group. The decision makes Pennine one of the largest acute hospital trusts in England the latest of 21 UK trusts to be helped by Kainos on their journey to become paperless by 2018. The aim is to transform the way the Trust provides patient information to clinicians making patient records available to them whenever they are needed, wherever they are based, plus supply them with the same fully consistent and up-to-date version of patient information in order to boost patient safety. EDM Group will scan over 100 million images in the first year a process to be followed by a sustained programme of scanning over subsequent years to ensure as much paper is removed as possible. In total around 450 million images are expected to be captured over eight years. Improved access to clinical data will also help streamline internal processes, as well as ultimately deliver significant cost savings, the Trust anticipates. Christine Walters, Director of IM&T at The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, said, 'A vast amount of time, work and energy is spent just moving case notes around. We went out to find a solution to help us remove paper case notes completely.' The Trust also plans to leverage its investment in the Evolve eForms and Workflow to consolidate the use of electronic forms at the point of care removing paper at source as quickly as possible to maximise benefits. Kainos's partner EDM Group was chosen because of its experience and proven ability to deliver challenging large-scale medical record capture projects. Nigel Hutchinson, Head of Evolve at Kainos, commented, 'We are extremely pleased that yet another major Trust has entrusted its medical records digitisation ambitions to Evolve. This is one of the largest electronic medical record projects in the UK and one that demonstrates the tangible benefits of what can be achieved quickly and at large scale.'