Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust transforms healthcare infrastructure

Some key highlights

• The system has helped the Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Trust to become paper-lite — increasing efficiencies, freeing space and enabling monetary savings. 

• Removal of expensive off-site records storage facility costing the Trust hundreds of thousands in costs per annum.

• Extremely positive feedback from clinicians, finding the technology intuitive, easy to use, with multiple customisable navigation and search options available.

• Connected hospital sites will have access to the same digital patient records. 

Challenge

The project to digitise medical records was driven by three key factors:

Digital strategy

This project is part of Hillingdon Trust’s aim to enhance healthcare infrastructure and improve its digital maturity for a more sustainable future. Other key objectives were to gain efficiency, cost and space savings by digitising patient records that were being held in the hospital’s medical records library, situated in an off-site, leased facility.  

The COVID-19 pandemic was also a catalyst for these changes, as it highlighted the need for the hospital to adapt and reprioritise. 

Combined solutions

The Trust was working towards deeper collaboration with its partners in the North West London Integrated Care System. This aligns three of the Acute Trusts in North West London, all being live on the same clinical document management system. 

One of the Trust’s requirements was to integrate MediViewer with its Hillingdon Care Record (HCR) to provide a robust view of a patient’s health record. This was integrated with the Trust’s new Cerner electronic patient record (EPR) — bringing regional alignment across North West London, including Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust.

Demonstrating the business case for digitised content

Following a competitive procurement period, the Trust selected MediViewer for its intuitive, touch-screen user interface and ability to scan, index, archive and access paper medical records, both quickly and at scale.

With decades of combined experience working in the NHS and delivering complex digital transformation projects, we were able to successfully demonstrate how our solutions could effectively integrate into the Trust’s operations, supporting the Trust with all aspects of the project — including the presentation of the economic and scanning business case for further roll-out of the system. 

Implementation

Over a period of two months, we supported the Trust with its early adopter go-live with the ophthalmology department. From that stage, the Trust managed the deployment across the remaining specialties at the hospital via a phased approach to ensure that any challenges during the implementation process could be easily resolved.

Our early adopter process involved spending time getting to know those who would be impacted by the implementation of MediViewer and supporting the department to implement the system. This included mapping out the current processes for that speciality, to understand the existing paper pathway from a patient being booked in and receiving treatment, to when they are discharged.  

One-to-one training sessions and ward floorwalks with consultants allowed us to understand their patients, clinics and any concerns relative to each individual. This early adopter training was complemented by ‘train the trainer’ support for MediViewer champions, so that all future users are trained to Mizaic’s standards. This maximises buy-in, as the EDMS is easily deployed to wider departments moving forward.

Outcome

The system is now live across all clinical specialties. The Trust has already digitised more than 150,000 patient records — a fraction of what it aims to achieve.

Another aspect of the project is the digitisation of the Trust’s active and legacy records from their medical records library. This work was completed by specialist scanning service providers, Hugh Symons Information Management.

• Over 30 million images stored

• 150,5513 records digitised

• 14,6259,48 pages of information stored online 

Longer term, the Trust plans to integrate MediViewer across all partners in the North West London Integrated Care System, so that every site has access to the same digital patient records. This will be the biggest instance of connected hospital sites deploying MediViewer across the UK. 

“This project is an important part of our journey to remove the need to move large amounts of paper around our organisation. By scanning our existing paper notes and any new paper that is created, clinical teams will have instant access to all parts of their patients’ medical records.”

- Robbie Cline, joint chief information officer, The Hillingdon Hospitals and London North West