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.