Records digitisation project underway at Barnsley Hospital

Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has embarked on a major medical records digitisation project with partners System C, IMMJ Systems, and Iron Mountain.

The project will see more than 180,000 medical records securely scanned into the IMMJ Systems MediViewer Electronic Document Management System (EDMS).

Being run as part of an EPR programme, it aims to further the trust’s digital ambitions by providing clinicians with intuitive digital workflows, decision support, and care planning capabilities.

As part of the project, the trust went live with the fully-integrated EDMS MediViewer from IMMJ Systems in rheumatology in early September 2021, and it is now live across most specialties.

“This go-live has taken Barnsley one step closer towards its digital vision”, said the trust’s chief clinical information officer (CCIO) and consultant gastroenterologist, Dr Dominic Bullas.

“I’m very grateful to the digital leaders at Barnsley, and our partners, for getting it across the line and providing staff with an improved solution to support patient care.”

The MediViewer EDMS software integrates seamlessly with System C’s Careflow EPR to provide clinical-context launching of the digitised record.

The tightly-integrated platform enables clinical and clerical users to view the complete history for each patient attending the trust and search through the record for key clinical documents via the MediViewer SmartIndexing technology.

Iron Mountain (IRM) is contracted to digitise all active patient records, while the trust manages the day forward scanning in house with the support of IMMJ Systems.

I’m very grateful to the digital leaders at Barnsley, and our partners, for getting it across the line and providing staff with an improved solution to support patient care

Iron Mountain’s ingestion process provides electronic handshakes as content flows between the delivery systems, ensuring strict compliance with latest data privacy and industry regulations.

The combined solutions will provide instantaneous access to scanned medical records via the CareFlow EPR, safely and securely.

And the speed and intuitive design of the MediViewer EDMS means that simple-but-rich features enable clinical users to easily find the key documentation needed at the point of care, especially as MediViewer not only uses optical character recognition to ingest information (scanned or born-digital), but applies its SmartIndexing technology over the top, classifying information so it can be found via a single click of a button.

IMMJ Systems’ chief operations officer, Lisa Harris, said: “Barnsley Hospital has successfully deployed MediViewer, providing secure access to key clinical information at the point of care and delivered this throughout the most-challenging period in NHS history.

“This is a considerable achievement, and IMMJ Systems is delighted that the trust is already seeing tangible benefits.

Deploying an EDMS introduces significant cash-releasing and operational benefits, and Barnsley is a prime example of a trust benefitting from digitised patient records, even early in its deployment.”

Simon McNair, director of healthcare at Iron Mountain, added: “We have spent many years supporting NHS trusts in their move to creating a digitised, interoperable, and connected health and care systems.

"This solution, where the digitisation process transitions records seamlessly into the MediViewer platform, takes the service to a whole new level in terms of fast results for improved patient care, cost efficiencies, and a better clinician-led user experience.”