The Isle of Man government has unveiled a new digitisation programme for Noble’s Hospital and the island’s care services designed to increase efficiency and deliver enhanced patient care.
Minister for Health and Social Care, Howard Quayle, has announced that Noble’s Hospital is looking to the ‘Digital Future’ programme to remove paper records by the end of 2018.
The new initiative builds on the existing Medway patient administration and electronic patient record system installed in July 2015. The hospital will be scanning around 100,000 paper-based medical and maternity records and making them available to clinical and clerical workers using IMMJ Systems’ electronic document management system MediViewer, fully integrated into Medway.
Additional digital enhancements include the use of Medway’s clinical noting capabilities to support structured and unstructured clinical noting by front-line staff at the point of care.
The Isle of Man Department of Health and Social Care said the digitisation of records will give faster access to patient information, resulting in better care. The new solution will also save considerable time currently spent filing, searching and retrieving paper notes and reduce the space used to store paper notes by 90%. This represents a considerable saving, as new records are currently being created at the rate of approximately 7,000 sheets per day.
The changes come as part of the Isle of Man Government’s Digital Strategy, which aims to use technology to further improve all of the island’s public services.
The Digital Future programme was launched by Richard Wild, Chief Information & Digital Officer, at a special event at Noble’s Hospital. Mr Wild commented: “…this is a major commitment, building on the work already undertaken across many parts of the hospital.
This is a critically important initiative with real benefits to all the patients we serve. Many UK trusts have struggled to do this, but I am confident that we will achieve our goal of removing paper records by the end of 2018.”
Medway EPR is an integral part of an integrated health and social care service, which links health, social care and community services across the Isle of Man. This island-wide system also includes System C’s maternity, social care and shared care record solutions.
Markus Bolton, joint CEO at System C, said: “The Isle of Man is a longstanding System C client and we are pleased to see them moving towards a paper free environment. The full integration of MediViewer has been a very successful project and it has provided an excellent addition to our product portfolio”.
