For decades, the healthcare industry has recognised that the system of paper-based patient records is not sustainable. A typical hospital maintains about 45 million individual paper documents that must be stored and archived in a searchable manner. For this purpose, many hospitals employ the services of storage facilities, often at substantial cost.
In researching the most common challenges faced by hospitals, Fortrus learned the following:
• Although most hospitals now have an electronic patient administration system (PAS), there is little or no integration with other clinical systems and the system is typically not used by clinicians.
• There is increasing pressure on hospitals to provide effective cost savings, reduce patient waiting times, and improve the patient experience.
• Much inefficiency is due to patient information not being readily available, for example tests are repeated because the previous results cannot be accessed or available in the paper notes.
• Although some medical documents are being scanned, the way in which scanning is used still requires that the original documents be kept for legal purposes, thus not alleviating the storage problem.
• Overall, clinicians wanted to be consulted and involved in the specification of a solution, because they would be the ones using it.
These are all challenges that require careful consideration from the outset of any digitisation process and should be clearly included within the planning stage of any project implementation.
Some benefits of going digital
• Digital content is cheaper and easier to store
• Digital records are easier to share and increase portability and accessibility
• Data arrives at the point of care, reducing costs
• Digital records facilitate standardised data collection
• Improved patient and clinical experience, through availability of notes and case notes at the point of care, irrespective of location or time
• Cash benefits realised through digitising patient/medical records include, reduced administrative staff costs, longer term reduction in external storage costs associated with medical records
• Improved governance
• Enablement of better collaborative working with external agencies and other trusts
• Ability to access information remotely on mobile devices
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