Tags: VNA

An EPR Needs Demographic and Patient Content to Be Really Useful: EMC

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We are pleased to say we have the opportunity to hear from our long-term technology partner EMC, whose EMC Documentum Healthcare platform is core to what we do. So please welcome Jean Van Vuuren from EMC’s Information Intelligence Group, who wants to talk on the value of two very promising and important technologies relevant to the NHS; VNA, for Vendor Neutral Architecture, but also XDS, Cross Document Sharing.

EMC, via the Documentum Healthcare platform, has been providing solutions in healthcare for the last 8 years, specifically around solutions for the NHS. We are trying to help Trusts address some key areas: the first is a platform for an Integrated Digital Care Record (IDCR) and second is a platform for a vendor neutral archive for managing radiology archiving.

The key thing: while on the surface these are two distinct areas, actually it’s the same platform providing the solution for both these areas, that’s to say the Documentum Healthcare Platform. In essence, we are seeing the pathway where you can use these apparently separate approaches to get to a single patient record – with all the vital information needed stored in one place. In fact, in a recent independent study, three customers using Documentum in this way were said to be the furthest down the journey toward true IDCR status. These are the University Hospital Birmingham, also known as UHB, Heart of England, as well as the Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen Hospital (See: ‘And Now A Major English Trust Is Trying A Great New Way Of Delivering EPRS’; SynApps is our key partner for delivering those solutions at Royal Liverpool.)

So, why use one piece of software to do multiple jobs here? The main reason why one platform is a real benefit here is that you’re not looking after multiple IT systems; you are getting away from that whole approach the NHS is rather infamous for, where you have got lots of silos of information and it becomes very hard to join information up.

And from a cost perspective, it is easier to administer a single platform. But the real benefit here is that front line clinicians and their patients really want to move towards the concept of a single patient record – and that should include both electronic patient record information but also their radiology imaging as well, because it may well get to the point where a clinician wants to see the full patient history from one environment, rather than having a lot of silos.

If you look at the traditional EPR approach, by contrast: it is far more focused on the data element of the patient journey – demographic information, results and so on. What it never caters for is the historical detail that makes up the patient information, which tends to be contained on the physical paper medical record, as well as a lot of the notes that get generated around the patient. To make a full patient record, a useful one for clinicians and patients, it’s not just about the information you get out of your systems, it’s also about the clinical data that this is generated from.

That is where the strength of a document management approach to IDCR kicks in. The full electronic patient record needs both the important demographic information plus all this content, in one place. What we want to do – working with trusted partners like SynApps – is ‘content-enable’ clinical applications to get to that important place.

Kings Fund – October 15th – Unveiling Sectra Open Archive with SynApps VNA

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On Tuesday, October 15th SynApps, Sectra, EMC Documentum and NHS Supply Chain will gather to present ‘PACS Repatriation – Underway? Completed? Not off the block yet? – and use the event to unveil the Sectra Open Archive with SynApps VNA.

The event targets NHS Trusts irrespective of where they are in their PACS repatriation process and will discuss the options available and unveil the opportunities to move to an Interim or Trust-wide Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA).

Attendees will also hear from Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust on its decisin to deploy Sectra Open Archive with SynApps VNA and join discussions on the considerations for cross document sharing, XDS and XCA.

EMC Documentum’s Jean VanVuuren will present an optional post-lunch presentation entitled ‘Towards a Trust-Wide VNA’.

Nubmers are limited for this event. To book your place please email Gary Britnell (gary.britnell@10.128.0.8)

Prestigious UK IT Group Intellect Agrees On The Need For An ‘End To Silos’ In NHS Informatics

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“If you think about it, the NHS deals with over a million patients every 36 hours and over 250 million interactions a year. Is a paper and postage system that can take months the most effective way of providing care today? In any other industry that volume of interaction would be ripe for digital transformation.”

This is a quote from an expert called Jon Lindberg, who is associate director for healthcare at Intellect, the official ‘trade body’ of the entire UK IT industry, representing over 800 member companies who collectively contribute 10% to the entire national GDP.

The quote is from a blog he wrote last week called, ‘A digital health service we deserve’. In it, he summarises some of the main themes from a new Intellect study that addresses the self-same issues we have looked at in our series of blogs: how to use technology in one part of the NHS that we know works and extend it to help other areas, in order to moving to the kind of ‘paperless NHS’ the DoH has made an official target.

According to the Intellect report, The NHS Information Evolution patient information is “buried deep in silos.” What is needed is a practical set of solutions that will unlock the data and make it truly portable, open up the NHS to a wider range of technology providers; as well as introduce the mobile and connected technologies a 21st century health service is looking for.

The NHS needs to modernise, but to get there the NHS must do two things: punch holes through those silos of information, while simultaneously push for more open standards.

Key to all this is a new take on the underlying information architecture of the NHS. For too long, says the study, systems and services designed and implemented locally often work well, but end up burying information, making it inaccessible to those on the outside. A much better idea is an architecture that allows information to flow horizontally and follow the patient.

This looks to be a very useful new approach. I am also pleased that Intellect has picked up on the same cues we have spotted – which is to use PACS standards as the basis for a new form of EPR based on the proven Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) approach. In Intellect’s case, it has a wider remit, so addressing more than one ‘silo’ – but the idea is the same: the route to national NHS IT systems that work is to go bottom up, but with a strategic goal in mind.

What do you think? Could this work in your Trust?

UKRC – 2013 See you There!

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Join us at the annual UKRC event in Liverpool on Monday through Wednesday, June 10-12.

UKRC is a three day multidisciplinary Congress covering all aspects of diagnostic imaging and oncology. Whether your interests are in clinical service delivery, management, informatics or research, the Congress has exciting sessions and presentations to offer.

On Wednesday at 10:30, SynApps’s Mark Winstone will present Royal Liverpool & Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trusts’ ‘VNA to EPR’ journey.  Join Mark in Lecture Theatre 1 of the Exhibition Hall.

 

 

SynApps VNA Implementation Plays Central Role in Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust’s Electronic Patient Record Strategy

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The open standards-based vendor-neutral archive, which is about to go live, will store digital medical images and other electronic patient notes so that these can be accessed from anywhere and shared remotely in a fraction of the time taken previously. The Trust will also share the VNA facility with other Trusts and healthcare providers who are running out of time to implement a VNA

Maidenhead, UK – April 15th 2013 – In the next few weeks, the Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust will go live with a full-blown vendor-neutral archive solution from SynApps Solutions, the content management solutions company. Ultimately this will give the Trust’s clinicians – and external healthcare partners – instantaneous access to patients’ medical images and associated case notes at the point of need.

The Trust is one of the largest and busiest in the North of England, with an annual budget of over £400 million. Although the original trigger for implementing a VNA was the need to replace a proprietary picture archiving and communication system (PACS), following the breakup of the NHS Connecting for Health IT programme, the Royal’s plans for the technology go much wider.

James Norman, CIO at the Trust, explains: “We decided on a truly open platform so we could go beyond the scope of PACS and store and manage other content alongside medical images. To maximise the benefits, we decided to integrate our VNA plans with our electronic document and records management strategy, using the same infrastructure.”

The Trust selected SynApps for the VNA implementation based on the company’s experience and its status as an EMC-preferred VNA implementation partner. Its wider ambitions are linked to a new state-of-the-art hospital it plans to build. Before it moves into the new premises in 2017, the Trust wants to be ‘paperlight’ in the way it captures and manages patient records and other content.

The EMC VNA solution from SynApps, which is based on the leading Documentum Enterprise Content Management platform, is crucial to this strategy. Says Mr Norman, “We needed a future-proof solution that uses standards-based formats so that the content can be accessed by new systems as they come along, as well as those used by partner organisations.”

The Royal also plans to open up its VNA facility for other Trusts to use, as a cloud-based service. “We are one of the larger Trusts in the country and not everyone is at the same point in their journey towards implementing a VNA,” he explains. “With the SynApps solution, we have the ability to scale the system right out and help other Trusts looking for a VNA solution as a service for their medical content.”

More than 80 million of the Royal’s medical images have been migrated across to the new VNA to date, where they are stored as intelligent DICOM digital files. Once in the VNA, clinicians will be able to call up images from any location, on any device, in a fraction of the time taken previously.

“This means medical staff will have more time to answer patient questions, and explain a diagnosis and related treatment plans, improving the quality of care,” Mr Norman concludes. “It will also mean they can see more patients.”

About the Trust

The Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust is one of the largest and busiest hospital trusts in the North of England, with an annual budget exceeding £400 million. It delivers services across two sites and three hospitals, the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, Broadgreen Hospital and Liverpool University Dental Hospital, and employs more than 5,500 people.

Each year the Trust sees more than half a million people in its outpatient department and deals with around 150,000 emergency patients and day case admissions. It is one of the top teaching trusts in the UK with well-established links to the University of Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores University and international institutions. In 2013 work will begin on a new £425 million state of the art Royal Liverpool University Hospital.  To find out more about the Trust, visit www.rlbuht.nhs.uk .