MISL has been contracted to carry out one of the largest and most ambitious medical records scanning projects in the NHS for the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust (Royal Free). The project is to scan in a back file of over 550,000 historic paper medical record files together with all paperwork generated each day at the Trust going forward. MISL has completed scanning over 360,000 records to date since commencing scanning in April 2014. The project go live date was November 12th 2014 and by Christmas 2015 all the back scanning of medical records will be completed, a full two years and four months ahead of schedule. MISL is delivering the project from a dedicated scanning facility in Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire with a team of 110 staff working 24 hours a day, 5 days per week over 3 shifts. The project is proving to be a huge success and is testament to the way in which MISL has worked with the Trust and other suppliers to design and implement the most effective project process.
The Challenge
The principle challenge for the Royal Free, in light of the call to move to paperless care provision in the NHS was to convert a huge quantity of legacy paper medical records within the Trust so that they could be accessed and viewed securely in tandem with their Electronic Patient Record System (EPR) Cerner Millennium. The paper records were taking up significant space at the Hospital and making them available digitally would not only free up the space but also ensure that all the correct care record information is viewable when required throughout the patient journey. In addition the Trust identified that around 30,000 new pages of medical record information were being generated on a daily basis which would need to be captured within 24 hours in order for the electronic patient record to have continuity.
The scanning is carried out on Kodak i5600 and i5800 manual feed document scanners (8 in total).
The scanning task is split into 3 streams of activity. For Back file scanning there are 2 turnaround times; 5 days for normal turnaround and 24 hours for on demand scanning. MISL has separated the production teams to service these two turnaround times. In addition all day forward paperwork is scanned to a 24 hour turnaround.
MISLs scanning and validation processes are monitored by a production management system that yields daily reports to the Trust about progress and throughput in forensic detail. This high level of communication and transparency has maintained a very positive working relationship and has kept the project on track.
In the early months of the project the MISL project manager was situated at the Royal Free for several weeks so as to be on the ground to resolve any issues or last minute changes to processes that were required. Weekly project update meetings have continued throughout the project.
On a daily basis the MISL team processes 140 boxes (equating to 350,000 pages or 700,000 page images) of back file paperwork.
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