Author Archives: Sara Paine

SynApps Launches New Tool, ConXAudit, To Combat ECM Suite Audit Trail Build-Up

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System will turn your passive ECM audit trail into the true business tool it needs to be

Maidenhead, UK – February 10, 2015 – SynApps Solutions, the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions leader, has launched ConXAudit, an indexing tool to transform endlessly-growing ECM audit trails into highly indexed forms that are much easier to work with.

ConXAudit addresses a big issue that many ECM users struggle with: audit trail build-up. Enterprise ECM suites have a built-in audit trail feature which is useful for quality control and compliance – but the trail builds as more use is made of the system, leading to a database of potentially millions of rows.

A database that large is inherently difficult to navigate and interrogate, removing the value of an audit trail, plus it acts as a major brake on the overall performance of the ECM itself.

SynApps’ ConXAudit deals with both problems but also makes the audit trail into a useful source of management information by opening up the data for reporting and KPI purposes via a highly graphical, easy-to-use interface and powerful statistical analysis and graphing tools.

“Customers tell us that by turning to ConXAudit they are finding a difficult to use feature of their ECMs, the audit database, is becoming a truly mission-critical, useful business tool,” commented Mark Winstone, Sales and Marketing Director at SynApps.

“One of the first customers of ConXAudit is a major transport entity which has turned an audit database with 65 million rows in it into a useful management dashboard after years of problems,” added Winstone.

About SynApps

SynApps is an independent services and solutions company specialising in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technologies. Founded in 2003 by former Documentum services professionals, SynApps provides consultancy, implementation and support services for EMC Documentum and Alfresco, and has authored a suite of content integration solutions, ConXApps, that allow businesses to quickly maximise their investment in ECM technologies.

Organisations across healthcare, government and commercial markets rely on SynApps solutions and services to capture and share knowledge more dynamically and efficiently.

Find out more at synapps-solutions.com, or follow us on Twitter @SynappsSol

 

 

SynApps coverage in leading IT titles Computer Weekly and ComputerWorld UK: Helping Hospital Trusts realise their EPR ambitions via VNA

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Two of the biggest UK trade press IT titles are covering one of our most recent wins for our VNA solution – we encourage you to check out the coverage!

The stories report on how London’s Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is to use a new content management system to secure access to patient information and clinical images, thanks to a new ten year partnership with SynApps Solutions.

Kingston is using the VNA (Vendor Neutral Archive), a standards-based way of extending PACS (Picture Archiving and Communications System) services to incorporate DICOM and other format content, to make the sharing of medical data easier for clinicians as well as making patient records available across any combination of service providers.

The system also incorporates XDS Repository/Registry cross-document sharing capability, which Kingston Hospital plans to use to create electronic patient records easily accessed by doctors.

Please visit these websites to read more:

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240238242/Kingston-Hospital-NHS-Trust-moves-off-BT-with-new-picture-archiving

http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/public-sector/3594054/london-kingston-hospital-nhs-trust-deploys-integrated-imaging-system/

Kingston Hospital NHS Trust moves off BT with picture archive system

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Kingston_General_Hospital 2Kingston Hospital NHS Trust has begun redeploying its picture archiving system on a new architecture as it migrates off BT.

The trust will use a vendor-neutral archive (VNA) and enterprise content management platform from SynApps to secure transparent and safe access to images and patient information through a patient care pathway. For the full article, please visit the Computer Weekly website:

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240238242/Kingston-Hospital-NHS-Trust-moves-off-BT-with-new-picture-archiving

 

Drive up Care Through Sharing Information – A Patient Centric Approach To Viewing All Medical Information

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By Tony Backhouse, Business Development Manager – Healthcare Division, SynApps Solutions

Last time I talked a bit about the business drivers for NHS IT leaders in terms of bringing together both the structured and unstructured data. I then moved the discussion on to look at how our new Clinical Content Store can (and does) address those issues and help you, as a Trust IT leader, with those challenges.

I want to spend some time talking in a bit more detail about the specifics of the Store and what we are currently offering.

In these past few posts, we have been discussing NHS England Chief Executive Simon Stevens’ visionary ‘Five Year Forward View’ where he calls for more collaborative, patient-centred care, and access to more and more information to establish a complete picture of a patient’s health.

That’s a movement that’s happening not just at the departmental or even at the hospital-wide level, but beyond it, as different healthcare providers and, soon, social care and other stakeholders including patients themselves, seek to share patient insights to improve care across time and across more than one clinical context.

The SynApps Solutions approach to clinical content management is going to play a key role in addressing that – as it will allow all sorts of healthcare organisations to create a comprehensive, patient-centric view across all current organisational boundaries, irrespective of the content’s format or origin. The aim, at least at national, political level, is to finally get the true EPR happening (sorry but we don’t believe that the mega-suite is the answer to all our EPR prayers) and to becoming a ‘paperless NHS’ (http://digitalchallenge.dh.gov.uk ).

The problem is that this is happening in a time of financial constraint. Indeed, an immediate problem is the end of a lot of old Programme radiology, PACS and EPR contracts. Which means Trusts really have to get on top of what the systems of the future need to be to manage and share the Complete Patient Record.  And to do that they need to take a new approach to the management of all of this information.

So hospitals have to think about what could be the most cost-effective way to migrate back existing imaging data to new platforms while simultaneously ensuring that data remains intact, available and free from vendor lock-in. And as you may know, a popular approach to this challenge has been to consolidate multi-department PACS silos into a vendor neutral archive (VNA), as this offers Trusts an opportunity to consolidate imaging demands into a single repository, using agreed standards to ensure easy data retrieval out again.

The SynApps Clinical Content Storecan do all that, as it has a huge VNA component – but a lot more. A strong claim? Well, how about having a really powerful VNA with the added benefit of market-leading enterprise content management capabilities? What that means is the ability to perform powerful clinical content sharing, storing and management at the top level. That’s to say, not just all the relevant medical images but all the digitised or electronic clinical info too – in one place – which means it immediately enables a fully working EPR. From paper notes to digital images, from hand drawn pictures to Medical Photography, from locked away structured data to video and audio clips.

We are very excited about what CCS means for both SynApps and the market. Please drop us a line so we can continue the discussion.

We are currently offering a free consultative study to scope out the potential of CCS to meet your need, but be aware it is time-limited – so start talking to us today!

Please – take advantage of the seminar [https://www.synapps-solutions.com/events/addressing-the-twin-challenges-of-retiring-applications-while-increasing-access-to-patient-information] on Thursday 29th January at 12.30pm at the London Chamber of Commerce, EC4R 1AR, and find out more about the Clinical Content Store and how it can help you meet your EPR challenge.

 

 

 

Major UK Trust Selects SynApps As New Image Management Solution Partner

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Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust says this will provide us with the basis to share patient information and radiology images more easily within the Trust and with other London hospitals

Maidenhead, UK – 14 January 2015 – Content management leaderSynApps Solutions has today announced that London’s Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust will use its VNA (Vendor Neutral Archive) platform to secure transparent and safe access to images and patient information throughout a patient care pathway. 

SynApps has signed a ten-year contract to supply a VNA Clinical Content Store (Vendor Neutral Archive) and ECM (Enterprise Content Management) Platform.

The solution comprises the VNA, an emerging standards-based way of extending PACS (Picture Archiving and Communications System) services to incorporate DICOM and other format content to make the sharing of medical data easier for clinicians, as well as making patient records available across any combination of service providers – within both the NHS and beyond. The solution also incorporates XDS Repository/Registry cross-document sharing capability, which Kingston can use to create electronic patient records that can be readily accessed by doctors.

The need for a PACS system is driven by the fact that most patients undergo radiology examinations as part of routine diagnosis and treatment process for their illness or injury. The management and communication of the resulting images and information rapidly and efficiently with healthcare stakeholders is increasingly being seen as central to delivering high quality patient care, according to NHS England.

“We feel we are making real a long-term vision of VNA and electronic data and content management all living in one unified repository with the SynApps solution,” confirmed Norman Harling, Deputy Director of Information Management & Technology at Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

“We are delighted to be helping Kingston improve the availability of patient information and radiology images to Kingston clinicians and eventually to other London hospitals through our VNA,” added SynApps Solutions’ Managing Director, Jim Whitelaw.

“What makes a VNA-based solution so powerful is that we know it works, we know it’s in place – and that a VNA approach can lay the ground work for a truly integrated electronic patient record as demanded by the NHS 2018 Paperless challenge.

“The interest and take up of the solution by UK Trusts is testament to the VNA approach’s huge potential.”

About Kingston Hospital

Kingston Hospital supports around 350,000 people in the surrounding area including Kingston, Richmond, Roehampton, Putney and East Elmbridge. We were the first acute Trust in south west London to gain Foundation Trust status when we were authorised in May 2013.

We have approximately 520 beds and directly employ around 2,750 staff with another 300 staff employed by contractors but working on behalf of the Trust. Our main site is the Kingston Hospital site but we also run a number of outpatients clinics in the community, including in Raynes Park, Surbiton, Queen Mary’s Roehampton and Teddington. We provide a full range of diagnostic and treatment services and our flagship services include maternity, day surgery and care for patients with dementia.

About SynApps

SynApps is an independent services and solutions company specialising in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technologies. Founded in 2003 by former Documentum services professionals, the company provides consultancy, implementation and support services for EMC Documentum, and has authored a suite of content integration solutions, ConXApps, that allow businesses to quickly maximise their investment in ECM technologies.

 Organisations across healthcare, government and commercial markets rely on SynApps solutions and services to capture and share knowledge more dynamically and efficiently.

Find out more at synapps-solutions.com, or follow the firm on Twitter @SynappSol

 

Buying an EPR System Won’t Save the NHS

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By Tony Backhouse, Business Development Manager – Healthcare Division, SynApps Solutions

Last time we spoke, I started explaining why SynApps has expanded the functionality of our pioneering VNA (Vendor Neutral Archive), our system to help hospitals better handle their digital information (see ‘Saving the NHS – Let’s Start with Local Health IT’).

I also put that work in the context of recent NHS thinking on the central place of localised, useful health IT systems and how those local systems can be built from the ground up. This time, I want to put a bit more context around what we’ve done with VNA.

A term that I need to wheel out again to get us started is the EPR – the Electronic Patient Record. I hesitate a bit as the term has so much legacy, not all of it good, in the NHS (thinking about the National Programme for IT, of course – which failed to deliver a national EPR, despite all our best efforts.  The thing is, the concept of Electronic Patient Records is still a really good idea. It would be fantastic to centrally store, but easily access, your patient history and data wherever you needed it.

That’s especially true as we start to use more and more digital information and images in the NHS. Think about radiology images, MRI scans, output from an echocardiogram – they really all should be available in a true EPR. Plus there are lots of reasons clinicians might want to take pictures of you too, to record a specific injury on the night you were brought into A&E, or the progress of a bedsore.  Those images could be virtually and securely attached to all those images in your digital, e-patient folder.

So back to the true EPR. This is where it gets a bit complicated, as information in EPR Systems have structured, electronic file data that’s not that hard to store and work with (and there are some systems out there described as ‘EPRs’ which are okay at what they do). What about all the unstructured data, though? That’s the Images we have talked about, the GP notes, the letter or email he or she sent to your specialist two years ago – there’s a lot of information we’d like to collate and keep with you on that patient journey you’re making through the NHS, across your lifetime.

The reality is that a proper EPR is going to have to be able to manage huge amounts of both structured and unstructured, document and paper-based content. Most experts agree the ratio between unstructured (GP letter etc. digital image or sound file) data and structured is in the order or 80:20 – that’s to say, 80% is unstructured.

How does this connect back with what we have been doing at SynApps Solutions? Well, what we had with our great VNA archive was a brilliant way of helping you handle part of that 80% – the images from you PACS, RIS and Ophthalmology systems as well as those poorly filed Medical Photography files. But we needed to give you more. And that’s what the Clinical Content Store (CCS) offers – a way to deal with the rest of the 80%, the unstructured ‘eight tenths of the iceberg’ of that patient content you want to be able to work with as well as the inactive part of the 20% that is either Read Only or locked in departmental systems.

To do that, you’d really like to be to offer both a VNA and a proper clinical archive, an intelligent repository that will offer a way to access all the data you need, importantly, in tandem with your EPR System. You can work with that data in your team, by the way – but it will also allow it to be worked on by other organisations, giving the social care team, as well as other hospitals and primary care or mental health institutions that act as stations on that (lifelong) patient journey, access.

Best of, well, multiple worlds?

The great news is that the CCS pulls all this together. One, it helps you manage all your Read Only data. Two, it gives you a repository to start working with all your unstructured information, too.

But what is really exciting is that it goes beyond what an EPR currently does and links together all that great new content in a patient centric view for sharing both in and out of your hospital.

Just one extra data point to get you excited about CCS; one hospital that we work with is telling us that by using our system is going to save them at least one million pounds a year in not having to directly work with such legacy systems any more.

Maybe now you can see why I and the rest of the SynApps healthcare team are so excited about the Clinical Content Store and what we know it can do for Trusts.

Which is, building out of the EPR – but in a new way of working with all your patient data, in a way that doesn’t force you to compromise.

Now that is exciting!

We are currently offering a free consultative study to scope out the potential of CCS to meet your need, but be aware it is time-limited – so start talking to us today!

Please – take advantage of the seminar [https://www.synapps-solutions.com/events/addressing-the-twin-challenges-of-retiring-applications-while-increasing-access-to-patient-information] on Thursday 29th January at 12.30pm at the London Chamber of Commerce, EC4R 1AR, and find out more about the Clinical Content Store and how it can help you meet your EPR challenge.