As the NHS evolves, many trusts are developing into digitally mature systems, shifting away from the paper-dominated organisations they once were.

With the implementation of electronic health records (EHRs), it has become possible to deliver deeper insights into patient illness status, often in real time.

This, in turn, facilitates prediction and prevention of diseases; as well as development of patient-specific care pathways, enabling a move from a disease-oriented approach to care to a more patient-centric model.

MANAGING THE PATIENT BACKLOG

With considerable pressure to develop workflow processes to manage the 10 million plus patient backlog, many NHS trusts are seeking to leverage technology to increase efficiencies.

Clinical staff often face the overwhelming challenge of documenting each patient encounter as the number of patients requiring treatment increases.

3M Health Information (HIS) has developed and delivered its 3M M*Modal speech recognition solutions to support the NHS in development of workflow processes that simplify clinicians’ documentation.

These solutions capture conversations between clinical staff and patients and automatically populate the EHR. They also generate real-time, patient centric contextual queries required for accurate coding of the encounter.

Codified data is used for case mix analysis, local, national and international benchmarking, population health management, disease outcomes as well as reimbursement. Ensuring the integrity and completeness of this data quality is high on the NHS agenda. 

With the introduction of Integrated Care Systems (ICSs), aggregated regional data sets can deliver insight to determine requirements, availability, and efficiency of resources, inform patient pathways and develop patient prioritisation models to tackle the current backlog - all underpinned by accurate source information.

IMPROVING PATIENT OUTCOMES

As the expectation of high-quality care increases, there is an immediate necessity to automate and analyse data to drive better patient outcomes.

3M HIS is integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language understanding into its encoder solutions to analyse EHR source documents, extract the relevant clinical terminology language (SNOMED) and automatically map it into classification codes (ICD and OPCS) to present to the clinical coding teams for validation.

This process revolutionises the historically paper-dependent process, enabling it to be fully automated; from clinical input and mapping to relevant codes, therefore significantly reducing the burden on clinical and operational staff.

THE EVOLUTION OF HEALTHCARE

The challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic have required technology adoption to deliver efficiency.

3M HIS has been a part of this evolution, helping healthcare organisations around the world anticipate and navigate the changing healthcare landscape.

For more than 30 years, 3M HIS has collaborated with the NHS, providing 3M Medicode/Medicode 360 Encoder solutions alongside real-time analytics and consultancy services to more than 120 NHS trusts. 

Data may be known as the “new oil”, but one significant difference remains: the more that data is used, the more valuable it becomes.