In this article, Eva Weber, senior product manager at electronic document management technology provider, ABBYY, reveals how the NHS digital journey will break down barriers to create better integrated health services for all, improve the patient experience, and speed up drug trials and research innovation projects
A year ago, patient groups, clinicians and independent experts laid out a vision for the future of the healthcare system in the NHS Five Year Forward View. As we come to its first anniversary, how far have we come in reaching any of the goals?
The pledge is to deliver patient empowerment by providing more choice and better access. To achieve this, we need to create a digital healthcare programme that goes beyond a ‘paperless NHS’.
Digital technology has the power to create a better-integrated and safer NHS for our future. It will transform the way patient care is delivered and will decide how records are managed and provide the means for the NHS to become better partners with voluntary organisations and create more choice for patients.
It will also create new opportunities for GPs and hospital staff to actively participate in international drug trials and clinical projects, leading the way for the UK to develop the next generation of pharmaceutical research.
One of major obstacles on the NHS’s digital path today is the lack of a cohesive, integrated system. Patient records are frequently stored in silo databases and filing cabinets. GPs and hospital staff are faced with thousands of paper-based medical reports, lab results, letters and other documents, none of which are easily accessible.
Hospital staff are faced with thousands of paper-based medical reports, lab results, letters and other documents, none of which are easily accessible
Scanners and digital cameras, combined with recognition technologies and automated data collection, offer new ways to process electronic patient records. Text and barcode recognition technologies, document conversion, and intelligent extraction of data from paper documents provide a quick and easy way for staff to efficiently and reliably digitise documents and access the information contained in those. Hospital staff can also classify and transfer information to the corresponding module of a Hospital Information System (HIS) for processing.
The result is an effective, cost-saving and transparent information management system. With secured password protection, it can become available for authorised personnel to access any time, from anywhere.
Once digitised, patients will have the option to access their own health records and self select from a range of services.
As the NHS becomes more integrated with GPs and hospitals across the nation, it will open up opportunities to build partnerships with local communities, specialist units, and volunteer organisations. In turn, patients will have a wider choice on the type of services and care they wish to receive, at a time and place that is convenient for them.
Convenience is a currency that many take for granted, and that may just be one of the reasons why care.data has once again failed to launch. The lack of education around user benefits has opened up criticism for the project and its subsequent low adoption rate.
The ability to input patient progress and medical treatment into a centralised information system is essential for the foundation of better healthcare in this country. It enables management teams to review and devise new ways to improve care for patients – and in near real time, too.
With new innovations and a more-transparent data sharing system, patients can also take advantage of mobile technology for greater interaction with healthcare professionals and clinical research teams. For example, they can photograph the documents with a mobile phone and send it to their GP. Already, some healthcare providers are offering video consultation and diagnosis online.
Mobile document capture solutions can be integrated into existing IT applications in a GP or hospital. So all imaging documents - X-rays, photos of injuries taken by emergency services etc - can be captured and stored on the patient record alongside textual medical notes for a more-comprehensive assessment and faster decision on treatment options.
Clinical practitioners in doctor surgeries and hospitals across the UK are already working with selective drug companies in drug trials and research projects. As the NHS Five Year Forward View has outlined, there are plans to ramp up the investment in this field to create new ‘test beds’ and ‘green fields’ for greater innovations.
Data from regular patient surveys and university hospitals studies are typically collected on paper that is then evaluated manually afterwards. This can be time intensive and prone to human errors.
Automated data processing technology, however, provides the ability to teach the computer to ‘read’ handwritten text and completed checkboxes extracted from scanned documents. It will then populate the information to the correct fields within a database for researchers to conduct statistics and further analysis.
GPs and hospital staff can also use the same technology to manage prescriptions and speed up the time for documents to be manually processed. The automated data validation adds an extra layer of security to ensure correct prescription is given to the patient, further reducing the risk of human errors.
The ability to input patient progress and medical treatment into a centralised information system is essential for the foundation of better healthcare in this country
Patients’ needs are changing and new treatment options are emerging. Faced with a growing and ageing population, the answer to delivering better care is by empowering patients. In other words, give them greater control of their own care and treatment options, at a time and place that suits individual needs.
The shift to focus on prevention rather than cure will transform the future of our NHS.
Technology is already giving us more capability to predict, diagnose and treat disease. It will improve the ability for healthcare professionals to undertake research and apply innovation. It will create an opportunity for the nation – both practitioners and patients – to redesign our NHS services from scratch.
The next stage is to find better ways of organising care. Closing the gap between hospitals and primary care, between health and social care, between generalists and specialists might be the first step into this direction. The result would be the creation of an integrated health service that is genuinely co-ordinated around what people need and want.