Alfresco Software is deploying its Alfresco Digital Business Platform at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust to create an enterprise content management solution to modernise its three million-plus patient records.
The project was a significant undertaking as the trust employs over 17,000 staff and treats over 1.6 million patients each year across seven hospitals and 175 medical facilities.
We are pleased to see the direct impact of our technology on the NHS and to be able to make the work of medical professionals that much easier, so they can focus on what they do best, caring for those who need medical attention
Working with Alfresco, the trust’s success is now paving the way for other hospitals across the UK to become paperless ‘digital hospitals’.
The trust needed an open-source-based solution that would integrate with its existing medical record solution, as well as with a digitally-shared care record initiative that allows clinical staff to view healthcare information across multiple care providers and between different systems in real-time.
Using Alfresco the trust has managed to completely overhaul its records management system and has begun converting its massive volume of paper records into a digital format.
It now simply scans the information into Alfresco and then destroys the paper document, eliminating the need to store documents for several years.
“Alfresco has been absolutely pivotal for us in dealing with our paper records,” said Rob Child, programme head of digital health programmes at the trust.
“It fits in with our paperless strategy of trying to get everything converted to digital.”
“Out of the hospital’s 17,000 clinical and operational staff, some 10,000 will interact with the Alfresco platform,” added Jay Bhatt, chief executive of Alfresco.
“We are pleased to see the direct impact of our technology on the NHS and to be able to make the work of medical professionals that much easier, so they can focus on what they do best, caring for those who need medical attention.”
It’s very exciting to have a product like this that can help us get content out and share it easily
The Trust partnered with SynApps Solutions to design a process flow within the Alfresco Digital Business Platform to track and manage content, making information easily searchable.
It is also working to improve the process of creating online medical leaflets, including a template that asks questions enabling clinical teams to collaborate together to design a truly-patient-centred leaflet.
Child said: “It’s very exciting to have a product like this that can help us get content out and share it easily.
“We’re talking now with different departments about their processes to see if they can also be digitised.
“We want one platform to help solve all of our business problems. Anytime a problem is presented, we ask – can Alfresco do that? If it can, then that’s the way we want to go.”
Later this year, the trust expects to start uploading all of its 10TB of data and scanning its extensive warehouse full of paper records into Alfresco, making the platform its primary patient record repository.
