In the second part of our guest blog from partner EMC, Jean Van Vuuren of its Information Intelligence Group tells us more about how standards for document sharing can help the NHS as it tries to meet national efficiency and data sharing targets

As we know, a key goal of the health secretary and the current stated direction of travel for the NHS is to be ‘paperless by 2018’. But what people don’t realise is in the average Trust today, a huge amount of information is still being managed in paper format. The historical medical records that go around the hospital and follow the patient are often all in that medium – and that is, obviously, very expensive and cumbersome to manage.

To help, EMC, working with companies like SynApps, provides the ability to digitise that information on our scanning platform – but more importantly, manage it and make it available for both the clinician and the patient at the point of care.

And I think Trusts have finally taken on the concept of putting electronic document management or records management systems in place to manage medical records – which is great news. Here’s the next problem: now I have got important content electronic, how do we make it available beyond my Trust?

I want to suggest that a technology called XDS, for ‘cross document sharing’ is ideally suited to help Trusts start sharing innovation, as well as information – in a secure controlled manner, and on their own terms. XDS is basically a repository where you store your documents, and where you can profile them and mark and store them in industry standard ways. What comes with that is the registry – a mechanism, like a large phonebook if you will, that you make available and say, ‘I’ve got all these patient documents and images from radiology available; I would like to make it available for sharing.’

The point is that as long as another Trust or provider supports XDS it can easily and efficiently communicate with you via XDS – and they can then start sharing the information between multiple organisations. To do this (in very top-level terms), they can use XDS to set up an ‘access registry’ and get publishing information they want to share to other Trusts within a region or even nationally.

I think that is going to be key to the next phase of making patient information available across the NHS. We will see Trusts do this on the Internet, or via a secure mechanism from the Web, easily as it is supporting a standard format XDS. Imagine, for example, that one Trust has an XDS registry published and one of their patients is in another Trust; you can then go and request that patient’s information via XDS and get it shared securely and quickly.

So if you are looking at investing in any system that you hope will take you toward that paperless goal, it is sensible to make sure the system can provide XDS capability. I think you’re going to need it – and I think it’s going to be very useful for you too.

Today, I’d like to talk to you about an exciting range of products we’ve been building at SynApps that we call ConXApps. We think that we can both save you a lot of time and also maximise your electronic content management investment with this technology, the result of lots of time talking to customers about what they really want to do with their information.

At the top level, ConXApps is split into four: ConXSys, ConXMail, ConXOffice and ConXLoader. Let’s briefly describe each in turn. ConXSys is going to give you the ability to Content Enable Vertical (Business) Applications (CEVA). If you’re not familiar with the term, it was first coined by analyst leaders Gartner some years ago to denote where an organisation has a number of structured data centric applications but also needs to manage associated unstructured data such as that contained within a variety of content – images, video, documents, and so on.

ConXMail, meanwhile, allows users to store emails and their attachments directly within their corporate Repository, thereby enabling a much finer control around the security and distribution related to the information; sharing content as a link to the repository, rather than circulating the physical document, ensures that the data integrity is maintained and appropriate security levels maintained.

With ConXOffice, you’re going to be able to store Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents directly within that same Repository, so that these can be shared using ConXMail. This promotes collaboration within the workplace. So having created content with ConXOffice, you’re now able to share content easily using ConXMail in a way that promotes collaboration within your workplace.

Last, but definitely not least there’s ConXLoader – an extremely flexible content migration tool that allows you to safely and easily transfer content and metadata from a wide range of custom, in-house and proprietary applications, including file systems and databases.

You may have started to understand why we’ve created these products from those brief descriptions, but let’s be more explicit: we want your users to be able to use their regular, familiar Office applications, their productivity tools such as Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint and so on, and be able to save information easily into their organisations wider enterprise content/records management system. Why is that something worth doing? Because the number of clicks your users have to perform to do that, is often so many that they just won’t (sometimes can’t!) do it. What they have been waiting for: a nice simple interface to allow them to store, search and reuse information easily.

Let’s say a member of the organisation gets an e-mail that is important to a business transaction. They can now store that email, plus any attachments, either as a single e-mail, a single document or as an encapsulated e-mail with attachments inside in the organisation’s proper ‘memory bank’ (the Repository, of course).

How? Literally by one easy move – a simple drag and drop step, you drop it onto the appropriate folder, a dialogue pops up and allows you to add additional information to the e-mail and/or document. The beauty of all this is that your users never need to work in any other user interfaces and can work from within their regular productivity tools.

Of course there are very many other productivity features that we can go into another time, but the great advantage is that corporate information is easily shared across the team or to the most appropriate person, as defined by your information policies. Let’s look at how that can save your organisation considerable hassle. Most of us spend most of their day working in e-mail; but when we are all working with Outlook PST files like this, that PST file is typically local or stored on a server and is not generally shared. This results in a lot of duplication because people send stuff in e-mails all the time, because they think, ‘Have you got that e-mail I sent?’ ‘No, I haven’t got it,’ ‘Let me just send it to you again’ – and this conversation/process gets repeated over and over again, of course!

Many large corporates are now running into issues with email and document duplication as a result of this over-use of email (and with the associated problem of sharing information). However, we are finding that with the ConXApps products, the business is able to share information easily and ensure that it is available correctly at last. Through the ConXApps suite, which I have described here, users are able to directly declare mailed documents as records from within their application tools. That is quite important for many of the government organisations that we work with, because they need to be able to store their information as records so that it is held in a secure environment and retained for the appropriate period of time, and that there is an appropriate schedule in place for the deletion of it when it is no longer required and the retention period is up

I hope you agree that ConXApps provide a very powerful set of tools that will make a big difference. Let’s pause here, as that’s a lot of information about the ConXApps to absorb at once!

For more information on the SynApps ConXApps range, please go to https://www.synapps-solutions.com/products .