As a major teaching and research centre, we had ambitious plans to digitise our operations by integrating all open systems into a single hub. This would allow us to close our Health Records Centre, saving around £1m a year with the introduction of cutting edge digital systems, based on global best practice.

With a Southampton-based mental health trust and a community trust also joining the project, this major undertaking required working with a number of stakeholders beyond University Hospital Southampton (UHS).

One of our key aims was to start moving people away from writing notes on paper, and towards entering information into digital systems. Most hospitals, until they have a full electronic patient record, will be running a case notes library and moving records around their sites. We wanted to stop that.

In the longer term, the implementation will support a move from paper-heavy to paper-light working, and enable the three organisations to more easily share information with each other.

A different path

UHS differs from other digital front-runners within the NHS - its fellow exemplars - because we didn’t choose an electronic patient record suite from a single supplier. Instead, we are using an integration engine to join up our various electronic systems, while encouraging vendors to support standards, which will enable smooth information sharing.

As part of this strategy, we issued a tender for an electronic document management (EDM) system and, following an extensive review of the options by doctors, nurses and midwives, picked OnBase by Hyland in December 2017.

Having made our choice, targeted work could commence: The trust instituted a scanning programme that will see around 15% of its historical records – or 60% of those in regular use being digitised.

Two areas that had remained reliant on paper were electrocardiograms, and drawings - such as an image of a congenital heart defect, for example.

With our new EDM platform, we have been able to migrate these documents to a single, secure location, allowing the viewing of any document from secure computers and tablets.

Importantly, it’s a strategy that goes well beyond exclusively migrating medical records not in current use.

Building interoperability

While our immediate priority is to close the Health Records Centre, our systems solution will enable us to support further elements of its digital strategy. For example, it will make it easier to support clinicians who need to run remote clinics and make it easier for the acute, mental health and community trusts to share information with each other. 

We are also looking to make more use of the vendor neutral archive (VNA) system we now have available, which will allow us to share many types of images with partners.

Our EDM platform is at the heart of our digital transformation journey and a large component of the new paperless operation. Information will be much more readily available to clinicians and this will enable us to do some significant business change.

While the current focus is to close down our case notes library, we may also end up using it for HR and financial tasks, and take out more paper that way. This will enable significant business change and allow us to use OnBase for even more innovative things.