What is Unity?
Unity, the universal health viewer provided by Fortrus enables users to scrutinise vast amounts of information through a straightforward and intuitive user interface, facilitated by the use of the Fortrus Timeline™ view, which provides users with a chronological timeline of information, drawing-out relationships and also providing powerful search tools to mine data, quickly, precisely and always in context.
Unity provides users with unique ways to view and explore information from any source. For example, viewing scanned medical record documents alongside pathology results and discharge summary documents interfaced from other healthcare systems.
What are the benefits?
The benefits of Unity are vast, the solution integrates with multiple systems to create a single view of the patient record, which is essential when looking to deliver the best patient care and most appropriate treatment at all times.
Through the use of Unity, the time spent managing both the paper and digital sources is reduced significantly as is the cost associated in doing so. One of the most significant benefits with Unity is that there isn’t any requirement to change or replace back end systems, as Unity brings all the required information together in one single view and presents it to the user through the universal health viewer. This therefore enables the transition to a shared electronic record across multidisciplinary care services and clinical networks and between health and social care. Unity’s intuitive interface provides clinicians and carers with timely access to historic and current documents and information; they focus more time on their patients and less time searching disparate health information silos.
The flexibility of Unity means that it can be implemented in a reduced risk approach, ensuring minimal disruption, but still at a pace that ensures benefits are delivered and recognised in a timely way.
From the outset Unity was designed completely around clinicians’ needs and so constantly evolves to address those changing needs, where new features are developed to ensure that requirements to improve patient care are achievable at all times.
Fortrus has been able to design award winning and innovative features, such as the patented Unity Timeline, and the blending of structured and unstructured patient data through a single interface.
Having delivered the largest transformations of paper to electronic records within the NHS to date, Fortrus knows that a successful outcome is not just about good software. Scanning, indexing and change management strategies are just a few other key elements required to ensure successful implementation and adoption of a digital health record, whereby the benefits can be quickly realised.
How will it help health and social care professionals?
Fortrus also extends the application capability to frontline users with a portfolio of mobile applications that run on any device. These applications allow users to record information into electronic forms designed for specific use cases, and trigger digital workflows that enable previous workflows to be streamlined.
Having the ability to access information within other care provider systems, through one intuitive interface enables users to enter patient information and related data quickly and efficiently, thus making the data accessible to other users, instantly. Having the ability to access Unity remotely on a mobile device also means that care providers can manage care plans remotely at the point of care.
Unity provides health and social care professionals with instant access to patient information and presents it right at their fingertips, this information can be accessed both within the trust and also remotely from professionals working in the community and within patients homes.
What will service users get out of it?
Health and social care organisations can improve the quality of their services and improve the experience had by their service users. Simply having the information at the time and point of care avoids unnecessary delays that can frustrate and worry. Spending an increased amount of meaningful time with their care provider results in a more positive experience for the service user.
Service users also gain access to their complete medical record and gain the reassurance that their care provider also has up-to-date and accurate information about their condition, diagnosis and treatment plan, ensuring the best and most appropriate level of care at all times.
How will it affect the healthcare sector?
The benefits that the healthcare sector would realise from the adoption of Unity, would include things like resources being freed up to deliver better patient care rather than unnecessary time being wasted on managing paper and digital information. Thereby, reducing overall costs and the time taken to diagnose and treat patients accurately and efficiently.
How does an open source approach work and what benefits does it bring?
Many people think of free software when they think of open source, but actually the real benefit is being part of a community that can support each other as well as feed improvements into the systems going forward and whereby benefits can be gained by sharing those lessons learnt. Unity empowers organisations to be part of the open source community, by ensuring an increased movement of digital information, while continually improving access to health and social care professionals, service users and carers alike.
By investing in open source technologies cash savings can be made and progress measured through the improved patient outcomes that are resultant. One example of this is clinically-led process design that has enabled service users themselves to become far more involved in the design and deployment of new open source systems. This means they can mould and change the processes around their organisation’s unique profile and culture, rather than be locked in to a traditional vendor system that takes time and investment to change and improve.
The content on this page is produced and controlled by Fortrus.
