Milton Keynes University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is upgrading to the latest version of CCube Solution’s electronic document management software (EDMS) to build upon a hugely-successful implementation first started seven years ago.
To date, the system contains in excess of 100 million pages and is used day to day by around 4,000 staff.
Utilising a completely re-architected version of CCube Solutions’ software, version 4 will introduce support for mobile devices, offer OCR capability, and ultimately be integrated with the trust’s Cerner Millennium EPR system.
“Virtualisation means we can dynamically respond to the needs of the hospital for IT performance and storage and in the unlikely event of a server hardware failure, the infrastructure will immediately failover such that the EDM and EPR systems will not be affected
Craig York, Milton Keynes University Hospital’s associate director of IT, said: “It’s hard to understand why some trusts have yet to grapple with legacy records management.
“It’s really difficult to run outpatient clinics without patient notes, especially as in our case demand is on the rise.
“In 2016/2017, we had 358,045 attendances up 11% on the year before. Our system has revolutionised how we work and we’re now in the process of modernising and enhancing it.”
The introduction of version 4 of CCube Solutions’ EDMS will enable Milton Keynes University Hospital to implement the following:
- Offer the potential for mobile access to the EDMS to introduce devices like smartphones and tablets across the hospital which allow staff to roam around wards and access information at the point of care. This would improve efficiency, effectiveness and reduce clinical risk. Based on Microsoft’s scalable ASP.Net MVC framework, version 4 is ‘web friendly’ and has a HTML-based front end
- Introduce technologies like Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to enable people to use keywords to find documentation quicker rather than just relying on chapters within the patient record. Adding OCR capability also means that when patient records are batched scanned, the use of separation sheets can be reduced. These are actually costly given the trust is scanning around one million documents per month in-house using high-performance production scanners. OCR can automatically recognise what type of form is being processed with it then saved into the correct chapter
- As the CCube EDMS has open API, the plan is to closely integrate it with the Cerner Millennium to provide clinicians with a complete patient view accessed from one screen – both the older scanned legacy records in EDMS and new information contained in the EPR
York said: “We’re looking to introduce a button within Cerner Millennium which will seamlessly launch the CCube EDMS when you click on it so clinicians avoid flicking between two systems logging in and out – valuable time better spent dealing with patients.”
The hospital is also transitioning away from a part virtual part physical server estate onto a fully-virtualised environment located at two separate datacentres on the hospital campus. The trust will use Microsoft HyperV running Windows Server 2016. CCube EDMS will be migrated to run on this which will improve resilience and performance of the system.
Ian Fabbro, IT programme manager, said: “Virtualisation means we can dynamically respond to the needs of the hospital for IT performance and storage and in the unlikely event of a server hardware failure, the infrastructure will immediately failover such that the EDM and EPR systems will not be affected.”
Patient information is available at the right place and at the right time and the developments we’re working on now seek to make it even more user friendly and accessible
To transition to version 4 of CCube’s EDMS, a comprehensive work plan is in place with the system expected to be fully live by the end of July. The IT team will build around 20 virtual servers for test, training and live environments, with CCube Solutions’ engineers then onsite to undertake system testing and the migration of the current SQL database to the new platform. This is a complex task as EDMS contains some 100 million documents along with associated meta-data.
Vijay Magon, CCube Solutions’ managing director, said: “Our EDMS is completely embedded into the running of Milton Keynes Hospital today and the clinical body accustomed to using it.
“Patient information is available at the right place and at the right time and the developments we’re working on now seek to make it even more user friendly and accessible.”
