In a project that won the coveted Project of the Year trophy at the 2020 DM Awards, IMMJ Systems deployed its clinical electronic document management solution at one London NHS Trust in order to support virtual clinical operations during the COVID-19 crisis
In order to address some immediate challenges the NHS are facing IMMJ Systems designed the MediViewer "Rapid Deployment Service" (RDS) to support "Virtual Clinics" during the COVID - 19 pandemic. The RDS allows Healthcare professionals to view a patient's digitised record from anywhere whilst accessing a Hospitals Virtual Clinic system.
London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust is one of the largest integrated care trusts in the country, providing hospital and community services to the people of Brent, Ealing, Harrow and beyond. Its team of more than 8,000 clinical and support staff serves a diverse population of approximately one million people.
As well as delivering community services across the three London boroughs, the Trust provides acute hospital services at: Central Middlesex Hospital, Ealing Hospital, Northwick Park Hospital and St Mark's Hospital.
In early spring 2020 - at the very start of the Coronavirus global pandemic - London North West (Northwick Park) were front and centre in seeing the first COVID-19 patient and being the first hospital in the UK providing testing services for the treatment.
In early March 2020 London North West University Healthcare NHS contacted IMMJ Systems to work and support their need to deploy the IMMJ Systems' clinical electronic document management solution, MediViewer, using its Rapid Deployment Service, uniquely designed to minimise COVID-19 cross infection between patients, consultants and other hospital employees by supporting virtual clinics as a matter of urgency. MediViewer support the Trust's Virtual Outpatient Clinics by minimising the potential for COVID-19 cross infection between patients, consultants, nurses and any other exposed hospital workers.
"Faced with the COVID-19 crisis and the urgent need to move to virtual Outpatient services, we were under pressure to find a solution that would support our consultants with relevant patient information required to deliver effective virtual clinics. Having already been exposed to IMMJ Systems' MediViewer solution at The Hillingdon Hospital we knew this was the solution for us. This has been a successful partnership between the trust and tech to deliver critical digital information, during a very challenging time "
The rapidly deployed solution incorporated a "scan on demand" service of all patient records ahead of each Virtual Clinic, providing the consultant with remote access to key digitised patient records that were currently held in paper format in the hospital's medical records libraries and across the hospital site.
Sonia Patel, Chief Information Officer at London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust and The Hillingdon Hospital as well as the newly appointed Chief Information Officer for NHSX, commented on the partnership with IMMJ: "Faced with the COVID-19 crisis and the urgent need to move to virtual Outpatient services, we were under pressure to find a solution that would support our consultants with relevant patient information required to deliver effective virtual clinics. Having already been exposed to IMMJ Systems' MediViewer solution at The Hillingdon Hospital we knew this was the solution for us. This has been a successful partnership between the trust and tech to deliver critical digital information, during a very challenging time "
MediViewer's cloud-based solution provides the platform for London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust with access to patient records any time, anywhere and on any device.
Tens of thousands of patient medical records have been securely scanned and stored in IMMJ Systems' MediViewer platform thereby reducing not only the need for patients to attend the hospital for appointments but also enabling clinicians to work remotely. Furthermore, the solution will also ensure that medical records will no longer need to be moved around the hospital where they are physically handled many times before, during and after each patient appointment.
The project commenced following urgent board approval to procure, implement and deploy the required strategy in support of making patient medical records available to support virtual outpatient clinics.
IMMJ Systems developed a 'new world' scanning model, so that the Trust could accurately forecast patient attendance levels both now during the global pandemic and also predict activity post COVID and what this would look like.
Following board approval IMMJ Systems agreed to work at risk such that the commercial elements and contracting were secondary to ensuring that they could actively support the Trust with the rapid deployment to support virtual outpatient clinics.
It took IMMJ's technical services teams less than 11hrs to build the required infrastructure (including Disaster Recovery), install the software application, integrate with the Trust's Active Directory and be live in the Trust's network. The next step was to align the scanning partner the Trust had been working with for a number of years.
A clearly defined strategy was put in place even taking into account that medical records sent off site to be scanned would need to be placed into quarantine minimising the risks of cross contamination in this process too. The Trust opted to go-live within their Rheumatology service on April 28th with the project working towards enterprise adoption by December 2020.
IMMJ Systems places as much emphasis on the implementation and transformation processes as on the technology itself, and this combination ensured the Trust were truly working with a safe pair of hands.
The immediate results and impact of the project undertaken at London North West Healthcare were significant. Providing a best of breed electronic document management system that could be used on any device in any location providing access to scanned clinical records was pivotal during these times - and the impact has been demonstrable.
The wider reaching benefits are such that the Trust is able to plan a vast reduction in the spend on managing physical medical records, estate costs and operational savings in respect of the manual time spent managing physical records in circulation.
More info: www.immjsystems.com