SynApps has just announced an exciting new product: ConXPhoto, a new addition to its expanding Vendor Neutral Archive solution set for NHS users. The idea: make it really simple but also totally safe and trackable for nurses to take the digital pictures of patients increasingly demanded by medical needs, but which have up until now too often been stored in haphazard, inaccessible ways.

Here, Mark Winstone, SynApps Solutions’ Sales and Marketing Director, continues to explain the functionality of the product and how ConXPhoto, despite being an obvious solution to a specific problem, actually fits very neatly into the wider SynApps Solutions VNA-based EPR philosophy.

Last time I started to tell you about why we’d built ConXPhoto: NHS Trusts up and down the country are struggling to properly manage and keep all the digital photos they need to take of patients, which are often very useful in their care but which can also be very important if any kind of dispute or legal action happens once the patient is discharged.

Last time I talked about why the product came into being – how we were introduced to the whole problem of modern digital patient photography management by the Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

Following what the Trust’s Deputy IT Director had told us, we looked into the problem and discovered that there were some real issues here. Images were being created but not properly stored, deleted or backed up. You can’t blame the busy ward sisters for that: we employ them to look after us when we’re ill, not to be data management experts. So what could we do to help?

We have worked with Kingston, and a number of other significant London area Trusts, to produce ConXPhoto which we think it will really save everyone a lot of time.

In essence, we have put an extension into the digital cameras that the Kingston nurses are using which intelligently routes the images to a safe place: so not the thumb drive or shared drive where they were putting images before, but a central repository. We offer a simple Web-based interface that displays all the pictures in a ‘light box’ format, so they can easily click on the ones they want to save for the patient.

We then prompt them to enter appropriate information – but what’s better is that we’re getting the metadata in: the nurses are inputting the NHS ID number of the patient in question by linking into the other records we have for that individual in the main hospital database.

Which, if it is ours, will also be the place where the patient’s case notes, radiology files, endoscopy video (video is almost as big an issue for the NHS as patient still photography), scanned paper notes and so on all reside. Once again, you have the connected, holistic electronic patient record basis that we have been waiting for.

The end result of our work with Kingston and the other Trusts we have been piloting this with is ConXPhoto: a way to safely record and validate accurate, time stamped, auditable images around a patient journey, stored in the correct, safe way and in a medium (such as a VNA system) that lends itself to easy access and integration.

The shape of all patient records to come?

To sum up: there are four big winners from ConXPhoto.

One is the nursing staff – who can get this small but important job done much more efficiently.

Two is the CCIO, the Chief Clinical Information Officer (the IT leader in hospitals who looks after the health-IT interface) who will get compliance and a proper way to manage clinical information.

Three is the CIO or IT Director of a Trust – who will be able to see that a chaotic process, leading to proliferation of files on all sorts of media, is going to be done in a controlled and validated way.

Last, but absolutely not least, – the patient. Patients will see more efficient wards with clinicians able to spend more time on our care and who will be storing away information that may be highly useful to refer to in an accurate, dated and detailed way.

ConXPhoto is a really exciting and useful product solving a real problem for the NHS of 2014 – but it is also yet another example of the fantastic way that a VNA system, which by definition is a system that can capture and help manage any sort of digital information, is the way all patient information systems really need to go.

SynApps has just announced an exciting new product: ConXPhoto, a new addition to its expanding Vendor Neutral Archive solution set for NHS users. The idea: make it both really simple but also totally safe and trackable for nurses to take the digital pictures of patients increasingly demanded by medical needs, but which have up until now too often been stored in haphazard, inaccessible ways.

Here, Mark Winstone, SynApps Solutions’ Sales and Marketing Director, outlines some of the reasons why the company has decided to invest in this intriguing new area of functionality. We’re hopefully not giving anything away when we say: it’s all about customer demand.

We’ve not been talking to you for a while, on this blog, about our great solution for healthcare users – the VNA (see ‘Royal’ Approval for VNA-based EPR’) based foundation we (and our growing roster of NHS customers) feel is the best approach to building the workable electronic patient records (EPRs) the NHS is crying out for.

In this, the first of two short blogs, I want to bring you up to speed on what’s happening there –not so much with the EPR directly, though that is relevant, but about how we have gone from helping one Trust with one particular problem into adding functionality we know is going to be applicable across the health service.

Let’s start the story by explaining a bit about the problem we addressed.

Poor collection of metadata

Time was hospitals had an internal photographic department. Its purpose was to take photographs of patients, e.g. if they had come in with particular sorts of injuries, had developed a particularly severe rash, had (unfortunately) developed a nasty bed sore and so on.

In the days of wet film, all this was done by non-clinical staff and there was structure to it – prints were included with the paper files. Times have moved on, both in terms of NHS budgets and the state of modern camera technology. Now photographs are generally taken by a nurse, typically via a £100 digital camera.

We don’t need those extra staff and it’s obviously more convenient to have those images in an electronic format. But what happens to those images? Where do they end up? Who is looking after them? Are they being routed, as a matter of course, to the hospital’s main PAS (patient administration system) or other database?

In most cases, they are going on to USBs or CD or on to the nearest laptop or desktop, or who knows where. And while the nurses are obviously doing their best to label everything correctly, they are not metadata experts – so the link to the rest of the patient information isn’t always getting properly captured.

Photography management

That’s obviously a bit disorganised. The situation is a lot more worrying when you reflect that a lot of doctors and Trusts get sued: patients can end up very unhappy with their treatment, alleging poor care and malpractice. But if a legal dispute comes up and proper evidence in the form of contemporaneous images isn’t to hand, that’s going to be a problem. Now think about how you’d find a particular image for a patient internally – and then for another hospital needing to know what that skin condition looked like on the 4^th of May.

Not straightforward.

It was certainly presented to us as a problem by one of our key customers, Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. Its Deputy Director IT and IT Programme Manager, Norman Harling is interested in the possibilities of VNA as an EPR foundation, but when he told us that a more immediate issue was this area of patient photography management, we started to think about how we could help him.

Now that I have set the scene as to why this NHS photography area is a live issue. In the next blog, I’ll delve into what we have specifically done for Kingston and how that has become the basis for this wider ConXPhoto product.