While the digital transformation within the healthcare sector is well underway, trusts still have a long way to go when it comes to embracing a truly-paperless NHS, writes Eva Weber, senior product marketing manager at ABBYY. In this article, she argues that accessibility to digital information is critical to saving time, money and already-hugely stretched resources. Even more importantly, digital archiving and document classification has the potential to draw value from the data collected in order to advance medical research through isolating and understanding specific illnesses
While the digital transformation of UK healthcare is well underway; trusts still have a way to go when it comes to embracing a truly-paperless NHS. However, we are seeing in the news that the sector is starting to take bigger steps towards delivering digital access to patient data.
Digital archiving and document classification has the potential to advance medical research, drawing value from the data collected by isolating and understanding specific illnesses
Secure, faster, and easier access to information is critical to saving time and money amid already-stretched resources. Along with this, digital archiving and document classification has the potential to advance medical research, drawing value from the data collected by isolating and understanding specific illnesses. Being able to access and gain visibility into data opens the door to both learn and innovate.
The NHS has traditionally been perceived as a late adopter of technology, with no requirements for practices to have computerised patient record capabilities. In comparison, New Zealand has one of the world’s-highest rates of IT adoption among primary care physicians, with an almost 100% uptake. In addition, in Israel all healthcare plans have an electronic healthcare record (EHR) system that links all community-based providers, including primary care physicians, specialists, labs and pharmacies.
In February 2016, the UK Government announced it would invest £4billion towards the digitisation of the NHS. This investment, which follows the £10billion EHR project the NHS abandoned in 2013, is an important step forward. It will enable the NHS to keep pace with the rest of the healthcare sector and innovate when it comes to technological advances in medicine.
Investing in digitising patient records has huge potential for transforming our NHS. Nonetheless, it’s one part of a wider IT modernisation programme that is needed in UK healthcare. In Canada, during a three-year time frame, digital health produced an estimated $13billion in benefits, which highlights how digitisation projects can enable long-term sustainability of the NHS as a justification for this renewed investment.
A deluge of paper
The digitisation of the NHS is something that is going to impact every part of the organisation. Operations will change, IT systems will need an overhaul, staff will need training, and healthcare practitioners will have to adapt to new ways of working. Therefore, projects of this volume need the go-ahead and support from the top of the organisation.
The NHS is deluged by vast amounts of time-consuming paperwork. In the healthcare sector in the UK, it was reported that 2.5 million hours every week are wasted on paperwork. As technology has advanced over the years, manually entering documents, one-by-one, into a data entry system, no longer needs to take up such large volumes of time.
The NHS has traditionally been perceived as a late adopter of technology, with no requirements for practices to have computerised patient record capabilities
During this integration process, the NHS can be described as in a state of limbo, in a ‘hybrid’ system where both paper documents and digital formats co-exist. While some NHS trusts are innovating with the introduction of iPads and digital pens; for the most part, patient notes, registration documents, hospital discharge notes, and some prescriptions, are still in paper form.
In order to be able to drive efficiency, digitisation projects need to be more than just technology that converts documents into digital format - it needs to enable organisations to search for that document within a huge archive of documents, quickly. IT systems need to be able to support practitioners, acting as an enabler, rather than an obstacle, to their work.
As is commonplace in many paper-heavy organisations, clutter builds. As information pours in, the risk of misplacing or overlooking important data increases. In fact, figures by the Office for National Statistics reveal that Britain has fallen 18 percentage points below the average for the G7 group, highlighting a decline in productivity.
The time that medical staff spend on collating and filing information also continues to grow exponentially. Managing the flow of paper and digital data; collating it, storing it, tracking it and sourcing it when it’s needed is a role on its own.
Embracing technology
The pace of change and the influx of new and emerging technologies has enabled organisations worldwide to innovate and change the way they work. Whereas before NHS staff would have spent time rummaging through a hospital records room, or contacting another department or healthcare facility; digital access to patient data means that information can be accessed in an instant from a single terminal or device. Authorities in the Netherlands, for example, have already started implementing this centralised network in order to enable providers to exchange information more easily.
Digital records will essentially mean quicker access to patient information, easier tracking of healthcare history, and a deeper understanding of medical illnesses
Digital records will essentially mean quicker access to patient information, easier tracking of healthcare history, and a deeper understanding of medical illnesses. Digital facilitates the comparison of case notes on a larger scale than has been previously possible.
Drawing insight from large data is possible with the use of optical character recognition (OCR) technology. When notes are scanned into repositories and archived they are image-based. This means that if you wanted to source a particular document or a keyword within a particular document at a later date, firstly, it would be hard to find, and, secondly, it would still take time to source that exact reference within it. OCR ‘reads’ text, making it searchable even when the source is an image, such as a TIFF or JPEG (the most-typical formats for scanning) or a PDF.
Beyond the benefits that going paperless will have in the short-term, long-term data can be collated and analysed to draw value from it. In May, Google was given access to an estimated 1.6 million NHS patient records. This data-sharing agreement will allow Google’s artificial intelligence division, DeepMind, access to patient records going back five years and continuing until 2017. This will enable it to provide an early warning system to those at risk of developing acute kidney problems.
Cutting down on paper
While a ‘paperless NHS’ is very much on the Government’s agenda, it will not happen immediately. Digitising patient records will not only deliver faster access to healthcare records, increase accuracy of patient notes, and save on costs; but it will allow healthcare professionals to analyse and learn from previous experiences. This intelligence is essential to support the development of cures and to support other innovations in the wider healthcare sector.
Without greater visibility into patient information, and analysis of data, the medical profession as a whole cannot evolve
Without greater visibility into patient information, and analysis of data, the medical profession as a whole cannot evolve. A digital transformation of the NHS will mean it has the tools to innovate and respond to changing medical practices and evolving diseases. Doing this with speed and high accuracy levels is critical.