Tags: ECM

Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals Trust introduces a cloud-based Unified Health Information System from SynApps & Aptvision

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Hatfield, UK – March 1st, 2022 – SynApps Solutions, the enterprise content management specialist with deep experience across the NHS, has delivered the first phase of a major integrated digital radiology information system contract with Aptvision at Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals Trust (BHRUT), in what the Radiology department is calling ‘the biggest structural change it will make this year’.

The secure, cloud-based Unified Health Information System from Aptvision, implemented in partnership with SynApps, provides radiology teams with centralised oversight of the entire workload across its different sites. It is already improving the oversight of the vetting and prioritisation of patient CT and MRI for patients referred.

Phase 1 of the project has just gone live, with much of the new secure, web-hosted system now in place. This will now allow the Trust to triage and process the 600,000 radiology referrals it receives each year – including 5,000 Emergency Department referrals monthly – with greater efficiency. Its previous system was dated, and processes still relied heavily on paper referrals.

BHRUT is a busy acute health service provider operating two main hospital sites – King George Hospital in Goodmayes and Queen’s Hospital in Romford. It runs one of the busiest Emergency Departments in England.  The Radiology team provides services from three satellite sites in northeast London, including the new Community Diagnostic Centre at Barking Hospital. The radiology operation is complex, spanning theatres, dedicated scanning departments, and community facilities.

With a clear, consolidated, digital view across all referrals received at all sites, the Trust expects to radically reduce the turnaround times for priority scanning and reporting.

James Lovell, Operational Manager for Radiology at BHRUT, said: “Having centralised, at-a-glance oversight of our vetting queues means we’re no longer reliant on staff manually finding and collating paper referrals across multiple sites. Now we can monitor everything, cross site, via a single window in the Aptvision system.”

In the second phase of the project, BHRUT will switch on Aptvision’s order communications facility, so that the clock can start from the moment referrals come in electronically. This will take the Trust closer to its goal of same-day vetting for urgent referrals. “By the end of phase 2, we’ll be completely paperless – doing away with that sea of yellow forms,” notes Michael Hepworth, the Trust’s Radiology Speciality Manager. “This is transformation on a massive scale.”

In due course Radiology will embrace the system’s self-service portal option, giving patients more control over their appointments.

A year into the five-year project, BHRUT is impressed with the potential of the new integrated digital system, and the seamless service provided by SynApps and Aptvision. The UK-Irish technology partnership beat seven other suppliers to the contract.

The SynApps-Aptvision solution, which is 100% web based, allows BHRUT’s radiology services to be coordinated digitally from anywhere as part of a ‘paperless NHS’. Ultimately it will enable better patient outcomes, improved resource use, and fewer missed appointments (‘no shows’ are thought to account for up to 10 per cent of appointments across public hospitals.)

Designed to integrate seamlessly with other Trust systems, the system offers controls to referring doctors, too and can prevent overbookings.

SynApps, which has a strong presence in the NHS for providing integrated information systems, is providing comprehensive implementation services. “This is completely seamless to us,” Michael says. “SynApps’ involvement gave us the confidence to choose the Aptvision system, as the company is very well known for its information systems services across the NHS. But having the two companies work so seamlessly as one is invaluable.”

Of the new system, he adds, “We’re investing heavily at the moment, doubling our scanner numbers and increasing our scanning centres but, of the £12 million we’ve allocated, the move to the new SynApps-Aptvision system is the single biggest transformation we’ll make this year.”

SynApps Announces the General Availability of its New eReferrals Gateway Solution, Developed in Partnership with Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust

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The native NHS e-Referral Service (e-RS) integration, which is already generating significant interest among UK trusts, will allow secondary care providers to digitally disseminate referrals to clinicians with patient records

Hatfield,  UK – September 15th,  2021 – SynApps Solutions, the enterprise content management specialist with a leading presence in UK healthcare, has formally launched its new e-Referrals Gateway solution for NHS Acute hospitals.

Developed in partnership with Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust, the solution allows e-Referrals content to be stored and accessed digitally alongside electronic patient records – addressing the inefficient practice of e-Referrals being printed out and circulated manually within hospitals. Crucially, secondary care providers can connect this to their existing patient administration or clinical systems, whatever the underlying repository – whether Alfresco, Documentum, etc.

The SynApps e-Referrals Gateway, which was tested in a successful proof-of-concept project at Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust and is set to be rolled out to other UK trusts, bridges a gap in NHS Digital’s electronic referrals initiative. Usually, when e-Referrals come in to Acute hospitals via the NHS e-Referral Service (e-RS), the content is printed out before being passed to the relevant consultant.

“The NHS e-RS is really just a user interface through which hospitals retrieve electronic referrals,” explains Jason Scholes, CTO and co-founder of SynApps. “Unless this is integrated with everyday hospital systems, the digital benefits stop at the hospital threshold. And, once the content is transferred onto paper, it carries the same risks of the notes going astray, or not being readily accessible, as have traditionally been the case with written or faxed referrals.”

SynApps’ e-Referrals Gateway provides the means for e-Referrals content to be captured and stored alongside electronic patient records, or other existing clinical systems (for instance those holding medical imaging records). The idea is to give clinicians seamless and concurrent access to everything they need, on demand, as part of a broader workflow. Unlike other solutions in the market, it doesn’t ‘screen scape’ the referral notes, but captures them natively using the NHS’s native e-RS application interface (API). This enables richer information to be captured, and supports rapid search.

To optimise the solution, SynApps partnered with Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust, a valued customer and digital trailblazer. “It was important that we got this right – and what better partner than Sandwell – a visionary Trust and a very knowledgeable customer of ours,” Jason comments.

Sandwell, which has eliminated paper from its sites in recent years and embraced electronic patient records, seized the opportunity to automatically upload referrals to its EPR system, so that consultants can triage them directly and move them to clinics.

Word of the latest SynApps/Sandwell collaboration has already reached neighbouring hospitals, generating a lot of interest, and a major London hospital is among the latest to implement the solution.

Says Liam Kennedy, Deputy Chief Operating Officer at Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust, which is co-marketing the e-Referrals Gateway, “We are very ambitious in our vision and are now in the top quartile among NHS Trusts for advanced digital operations. With SynApps’ support we’re storming ahead, and we’re keen to help light the way for others who want to learn more about what we’ve done.”

“We’re excited about the potential of the e-Referrals Gateway,” Jason at SynApps adds. “Existing NHS e-Referrals handling is at odds with Trusts’ paperless strategies. It is also critical that Acute Trusts are able to handle referrals reliably and effectively, with good traceability – so that they get paid for their work and cover their fixed costs. With this new solution, devised with proactive input from Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust, we’re bridging that gap.”

New Survey Reveals Impact of New Normal on Public Sector Information Management

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Covid-19 puts smart workforce collaboration, records integration, and data processing at the heart of public service

  • 18% of respondents log into 20 or more systems daily
  • 26% say their information search facility is ‘not at all intuitive’
  • 35% feel they ‘lack the right tools to find information efficiently’

Hatfield, UK – July 23rd , 2020 – SynApps Solutions, the enterprise content management and process automation specialist has today published the results of its latest survey which explores public sector information management processes, highlighting their significance in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic.

The survey found that public sector workers are widely using unconnected, legacy information systems and some are even using paper-based systems in parts of their operations, making flexible, remote working a stretch goal for many organisations. As the public sector transitions to delivering services in a ‘new normal’ that will almost certainly feature an increase in smarter working, the survey shows organisations must enable easy access to critical information wherever employees happen to be working.

“In a data-led public sector, the speed and efficiency with which employees can access information is absolutely critical to performance and quality of service,” explains James Paton, CEO of SynApps Solutions. “Almost three quarters of those who responded (73%), cited the use of multiple systems across their organisation as the single biggest reason they found it difficult to access information.”  James continued, “In fact, 38% of respondents said they had log into 16 or more information systems in the course of a working day which contributes hugely to service delays and performance issues.”

Moreover, the research suggests that an employee making 16 searches per day, taking five minutes each time, will spend 6.6 hours each week waiting for search results to be returned – or more if those searches are spread across multiple systems. Respondents also reported that quality of the application interfaces they are using is a factor in how easily and thoroughly they can search. 26% say their information search facility is ‘not at all intuitive’, while 35% feel they ‘lack the right tools to find information efficiently’.

Perhaps the most surprising fact to emerge from the survey results is the fact that 60% of respondents rely on paper records to some extent. Encouragingly, however, 71% of respondents said they convert paper records into digital files, for example by scanning or using OCR technology.

“An Enterprise Content Management solution that automates document management and streamlines information retrieval from a structured repository brings enormous cost and efficiency benefits,” adds Paton. “As workplaces become more dynamic and adaptive, the need for digital operations supporting collaboration at distance becomes more and more important. In the same way, platforms that aggregate quickly and efficiently wherever it’s required are a prerequisite for effective business process management.”

The new report, Information in Transition: Smarter Working in the new Normal is available for download from here

SynApps Transforms West London NHS Trust’s Document & Patient Records Management

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Modern, easy-to-integrate Alfresco system allows NHS Trust to improve search, reporting and more

Hatfield, UK – October 14th, 2019 – SynApps Solutions, the enterprise content management specialist, has overhauled the document and patient records management of West London NHS Trust, improving user access to content, the ability to search and reporting.

SynApps works with a number of organisations in the UK health sector and became involved with West London NHS Trust when it became clear that the Trust’s legacy system for its document and patient records management was not fit for purpose.

Users were unable to search text in the Trust’s millions of documents and individual patient records, making it cumbersome and time-consuming to find documents. Trying to generate basic reporting metrics was clunky and slow at best, and often impossible.

“Access to documents and patient records is critical to the smooth-running of the Trust and our previous system was expensive, slow and starting to cause major issues for us,” said Graham Birrell, central records and EDMS manager, West London NHS Trust. “It was clear we needed to change and we started to look at the options available.”

The Trust had to decide whether to upgrade its existing system or replace it, and it was becoming increasingly clear that a replacement would offer the most potential for providing the more modern and improved experience users needed. It was important to be able to integrate the new system with Rio, the Trust’s patient administration system, as well as increasing accuracy and productivity, and improving overall service delivery.

For enterprise-level content management, Alfresco stood out as the obvious option for the Trust. Not only did it have a modern feel to it, and come with some great APIs, when Alfresco introduced the Trust to its strategic integration partner, SynApps Solutions to implement the new system, the Trust was immediately assured it had made the right decision.

SynApps swiftly demonstrated that Alfresco offered a lot more functionality than before, such as the ability to preview content, drag and drop documents, easily upload files and display folder contents. The whole experience of using the system was much easier, faster and clearer, while it is has also integrated with other systems easily and transformed reporting.

“I have been in the NHS for over 20 years and I can’t sing the praises of SynApps highly enough,” continued Graham Birrell. “They’re extremely responsive, even out of hours – which tends to be when we contact them – even though this isn’t in their contract. They put enormous effort into the preparations and the transition to the new Alfresco system, smoothing the way and doing exactly what they promised.”

West London NHS Trust, formerly West London Mental Health NHS Trust, is one of the most diverse providers of mental and physical healthcare in the UK, providing integrated services across 30 sites. SynApps has a strong track record in working with such health organisations, a result of its ability to understand the specific needs and challenges they are facing, according to spokesperson, job title, SynApps.

“Our work with West London NHS Trust is a further example of the success we have had within the UK health sector. It’s a market we have a deep understanding of, and we know how important document and patient records management can be and the impact they have on service delivery.”

Tackling the referred pain of digital patient referrals

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As NHS England mandates that faxed referrals are phased out, and trusts look to alleviate the grind of manually re-entering details between different IT systems, SynApps Solutions’ Chris Brice charts a practical, pain-free way to exploit NHS Digital’s e-RS referrals service more fully – which delivers for patients, trusts and NHS budgets

On the face of it, NHS trusts are already making progress with electronic patient referrals. Steadily, GPs and patients are defaulting to the NHS Digital’s e-Referrals portal which will soon be mandatory for primary care referrals, to guarantee payment for services. Yet, although this is widely understood – and despite an appreciation that referrals by fax, email or other manual means are not efficient or easy to trace – a large majority of patient referrals are still being handled using complex, time-consuming workarounds. Even where requests are channelled via the NHS e-Referral Service (e-RS).

This undermines the purpose of the NHS e-RS, which is designed not only to provide a single central digital platform for capturing and coordinating patient referrals, but also to streamline associated processes, speed up treatment, and provide reliable traceability of a patient’s progress and status.

So what is preventing total take-up of the broader digital experience – where referrals pass quickly to the right person, and targets of faster patient diagnoses and treatment are met?

The issue is two-fold.

First, NHS Digital hasn’t yet developed its own workflow-driven applications to make it easy to pass referrals through the system automatically and track and report on progress.

Second, the diversity of IT systems used by GPs and hospitals has proved a barrier to integration. As a result, primary care providers have resorted to faxing and emailing referrals. For their part, hospitals have printed and scanned those requests, manually re-entering and tallying these with patient records held elsewhere on their systems. Rather than accelerating case flow-through or alleviating administrative workloads, this has often created more work and delay. It is not unusual for a trust to be manually re-entering details of 15,000 referrals per month. Some major trusts accept up to 50,000 patient referrals daily.

Joining the dots

For the NHS e-Referrals programme to have its intended impact, digital processes need to be joined up end to end. Then they can start to exploit intelligent automated workflow. That includes prompt diversions of cases to more appropriate specialists or services (inside or beyond the immediate hospital); and complete traceability and reporting – with rules-driven alerts, to ensure that no case enters an administrative cul-de-sac or slips through the cracks, and that critical performance targets are not missed.

All Acute trusts are aware that the current piecemeal situation cannot continue. As of 2020, faxed referrals will no longer be accepted, and NHS services already face the prospect that they will not be paid for referrals accepted through any channel besides the e-RS portal. So trusts and their primary care practitioners might as well ensure that the e-RS leads to perceptible benefits for staff and patients.

Fortunately, approved NHS Digital development partners SynApps Solutions and Alfresco have already put in the groundwork to deliver end-to-end electronic referrals solutions. These offer trusts all of the integration; rules-based workflow; process automation; monitoring, prompting and reporting required to fully harness the benefits of digitising patient referrals.

From electronically capturing patient requirements and connecting these to patient records; to accelerating the triage process and clinicians’ acceptance/refusal/redirection of referrals; to vigilantly monitoring, prompting and reporting on referral-to-treatment progress, our combined, modular solutions are designed to extract maximum early benefits from NHS Digital’s e-Referrals initiative for everyone concerned.

The expected benefits are substantial – including efficiency gains of 60-70 per cent compared with manually processing, checking and following up on referrals and progress to treatment.

And that’s aside from the benefits to patient safety, as cases are proactively tracked and escalated thanks to automated rules in the system. Robust compliance and performance measures, meanwhile, will help ensure that trusts are paid in full and within acceptable timeframes for the cases they have accepted.

None of this needs to be an upheaval or costly exercise for trusts, either. Our solutions can be run in the cloud as well as on premise, and there are significant grants available for trusts ready to make the full transition now. Funding is applicable especially where organisations come together on joint projects, in line with NHS England’s Sustainability and Transformation Plan. Each trust can go at its own pace too, or prioritise how it tackles its respective migration to a fully digital referrals scenario. That’s because the SynApps Solutions/Alfresco solution suite is modular, offering trusts the flexibility to concentrate on just the capabilities they seek right now.

How the market finally caught up with the Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) promise

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I hope you spotted the great news that came in at the end of last month that the most trusted name in the IT commentary world, Gartner, rated us extremely highly in that part of the market known as the VNA.

VNA is not the sexiest term for a technology ever, I’ll grant you – but actually, it’s a really important tool and one that could really help a lot of people.

That’s because the name – it stands for ‘Vendor-Neutral Archive’ – doesn’t really convey what its power or potential actually is. We know – we’ve been marketing some excellent VNA solutions, especially for the NHS market, for a number of years now, and the vagueness of that name has perhaps not been to its help.

Why? Because NHS buyers see the VNA as in, essence, a medical device… it’s a bit of software that is good for storing my medical imaging data, specifically all the PACS and DICOM data that I needed to find a safe and secure home for when the old off-site PACS storage NPfIT contracts came to an end in 2015.

Which it is – a VNA is a fantastic way to store very large data files and access them really easily. But that was never what a VNA was only supposed to do. That’s because, out of the gate, you had this really cool XDS tech built into it – XDS standing for ‘Cross Enterprise Document Sharing’.

Why XDS is so useful is that it is a standards-based way to work with multiple forms of content, of all different types. That means that a VNA isn’t actually just a place to stick big X-ray image files, though please carry on doing so… it’s actually an Enterprise or Document Management System.

Why should I care, I hear you thinking? Well, a VNA might not be a whole lot of use to a manufacturer, a retailer or a financial services CIO.

But if you are

  • an NHS CCIO or CIO trying to help colleagues in different departments
  • and/or an NHS CCIO or CIO tasked with helping connect records with other stakeholders
  • a local authority social care team looking to join up information on vulnerable or elderly patients to help address their complex, cross-team needs
  • a GP surgery looking for better ways to document the patient journey
  • a CCG committed to more paperless ways of working with patient data
  • a policymaker in an NHS England STP (Sustainability and Transformation Project) interested in the power of digital to revolutionise patient care

Well, then – yes – what a VNA can do suddenly becomes absolutely central. How: because it’s the proven, available and tested way to keep all patient data – from notes to prescription charges to medical imagery to social care interactions – in one place.

And from cradle to archiving – across multiple stakeholders.

In that Gartner report, that route of travel has been clearly signaled. The good news is that here at SynApps Solutions, we spotted the potential for this years back, and have accumulated relevant expertise and intelligence on doing just this kind of Super-VNA work (and have some significant trails underway to make a VNA-based Shared Care Record a reality – an in months, not years).

It’s brilliant to see that Gartner has caught up with us – but we’re not boasting, we’re just saying that we are ready whenever you are.

Let’s work together to make VNA do what you and your patients and service users really need it to.

Chris Brice is SynApps Solutions’ Director of Sales and Marketing

Digital Case Management: Why it’s A Lot More Than Just Giving Social Workers iPads

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SynApps has growing interest from the UK social care sector for its new digital case management offering

When it comes down to it, digital case management is basically a means of managing the ingestion – the capture – of case files for social workers by multiple means, including email, self-service scan stations, MFDI copiers (as well as back-scanning archives), and then pushing that information through a workflow.

What do I mean by workflow? Well, it’s a structured business process to properly capture the important information and then file it centrally, safely and digitally into an ECM repository, for example.  Then providing a series of alerts that not only notify the key members of the social care team about what they need to know, but with built-in escalation and an SLA that allows every case file to be managed and monitored to help you with a very key area of compliance – the Ofsted Inspection.

Overcoming paper

Our work here often involves a scenario where you have four hundred-plus social workers, a number of NHS Trusts, multiple GP practices but all working off a paper store of information. That means that every time a social worker goes out to meet a new potential client, they have to request information and that information is then delivered as a paper file.

For sure, what we’re looking to do is replicate that with an electronic version – so, rather than carrying a huge file and having to make notes via paper in front of any potential social care person,  it’s all digital – you scan everything, ingest it (i.e. capture emails), file any Word or Office documents and then, by searching the content repository, pull it together into a simple electronic document, then be able to take the case file on site, carry out the work they have to do and update the file electronically.

This is great – and a big advance for many a social work team compared to where they are today. For sure we are not the first to attempt this – there are lots of systems on the market already claiming to help at the sharp end like this. But what we’re doing that we think is better, is automating the end to end process and securely filing all of the case file information in order into a central repository and then integrating it with your whole social care system.  Now you can start to really reap some benefits.

End to end automation

Now, when a social care worker logs into their social care system, the complete case file is available in front of them – and you have the beginnings of a truly ‘end to end’ view of the whole case file; with all the information relating to this particular person – including their NHS or GP record, and social care record.  It’s all available in a dashboard, with any new information updated automatically in real-time and yes, your team has access to that information on an iPad and/or Android device.

It’s no longer a paper-based system, it’s a completely automated, electronic system – which offers real cost and labour savings, better record keeping for compliance and a way to improve the overall quality of your council’s service delivery, and genuine overall improvement in a very key, but often very financially strained, core process.

I think it’s pretty powerful stuff. Take some time to explore it more here 

Thanks, and speak soon!

Chris Brice came on board as our new Director of Sales and Marketing here at SynApps Solutions Ltd back in May