CaseStudy

From Document Manager Magazine Vol 18 No 03 - June 2010

While the general public perception is that things are still far from perfect, IT implementations within the NHS are actually in far better health these days than for a long time, as OITUK's Archie Menzies explains to DM Editor David Tyler

David Tyler: The NHS has long been one of OITUK's key target markets, and obviously you're doing very well out of it, with almost 30 UK Trusts already using your solutions. Do you have to be acutely aware of how the health service itself works, in order to best sell IT solutions into it?

Archie Menzies: I've been working in the health sector for over thirty years now, and in that time the sector has changed dramatically, with many different issues coming to the fore, including waiting time targets and pressure to meet the needs of patients. NHS Trusts have been affected with the delivery of modern IT systems that benefit patients - this has not always been acceptable to all who work in this sector.

The key requirement in health is to understand the information that makes up a patient record and why it is required: a single record that may need to be viewed by 15 different people, all for different reasons. A clinician will want to access the full medical history, whilst administrators are interested in information that will help them put a cost against an activity. There are also nurses, medical legal staff, and many more, each with their own requirements of that data.

DT: One of the central tenets of recent years' IT investment in the NHS has been around the single electronic record for patients. Are we any closer to it - and does that make ECM/DM solutions easier or harder to implement?
AM: The Electronic Patient Record is still viewed as a kind of 'holy grail' for both the NHS and its IT suppliers: what we have to remember is the legacy systems, which are almost entirely based on paper. If we aren't able to marry up the two, then there is a high risk of a clinician looking at - and potentially making decisions based on - an incomplete record. Trusts are now looking at ways to deliver a single record to a clinician or administrator, with absolute confidence that they are viewing 100% of the available information on that patient. This is where OITUK positions itself in the market:

We are able to position ourselves 'in the middle' of all the disparate systems and manage the data generated, whether an incoming email, an image from a scanned piece of paper, or a piece of data generated electronically in an existing NHS system. We bring all the information onto the clinician's desktop, as and when he or she requires it.

The advantage OITUK has in the healthcare sector is our many years experience of working in NHS market place. We understand the needs of our users across the various Trusts that make up the NHS, including mental health, acute services, and PCTs as well as general NHS functions. The format of the information being managed tends to be broadly the same for all of our clients, but local issues dictate how they work with that information.

DT: Does the emphasis on the Electronic Patient Record mean that suppliers are able to pitch a 'one size fits all' solution to NHS Trusts?
AM: From OITUK's perspective, the solutions we supply are entirely scalable. A relatively small Trust with a catchment area of 200,000 people, and another of over a million people have the same requirement from their EDM solution: their needs are exactly the same. The number of users who may want to access the information then becomes an issue of IT infrastructure, rather than the technology that we deliver.

With the emphasis on the single patient record, when a Trust installs our system the idea is for the data to be visible across the entire organisation, usually starting with health professionals. 

From our point of view the same technology and software can also be used in the administrative side of the organisation, to manage all the corporate documentation. Not every Trust will necessarily adopt the exact same processes, but the core solution is the same: users can find all the information they need relating to their patients through one tool on their desktop.

DT: With developments such as Cloud Computing gaining acceptance in the private sector, does the NHS manage to keep up with emerging technologies, and how does that affect the way firms like OITUK do business with them?
AM: NHS IT departments have improved dramatically in recent years in terms of their knowledge and understanding, and in the quality of people that they are employing to deliver technology. For OITUK, whether a client decides to use a hosted service or employ their own IT staff, our solutions can effectively sit in the middle of all the different systems that are generating relevant information and marry it up with any scanned images or other electronic data coming in from other systems.

We have developed our own NHS portal, which a Trust can choose to adopt or not - again depending on their own internal IT strategies and other local issues. In some cases a Trust will be using our front end to deliver all the information, while others use it to manage the EDM and Records Management side of their requirements. The portal was to all intents designed by our users - mainly clinicians - to offer specific views of the health record based on whether the user is a clinician, an administrator, a secretary etc. Our users look at the same information, but have it presented to them in the way that is best suited to their roll within the Trust and the specific processes in place.

With everyone's budgets being squeezed including the NHS the market is - as it has been for many years - a hard nut to crack; for OITUK this is still a very good market to be in and we have some excellent prospects coming through. This comes back to the fact that at OITUK we can demonstrate many years of genuine industry experience with an unrivalled understanding of the requirements of this sector.

More info: www.oituk.com

CaseStudy