The increased use of digital records is helping healthcare providers improve their services but caring for those old paper medical records is equally important, explains Simon McNair, Director of Public Sector at Iron Mountain.
The global response to the Covid-19 pandemic fast-tracked the digitisation of processes, especially those that supported remote working and those where the migration enhanced customer services. However, across the board – from retail to healthcare – this switch-up to digital platforms triggered a range of changes including the mass digitisation of legacy documentation, a conversion that underlined the value of effective records management. Good management of legacy paper records has been proven to help ensure a smooth transition to digital workflows.
Although not unique to healthcare, there is a wide range of operational benefits that encourage this sector to transition away from physical records. A reduction in on-site physical storage, which enables the better use of floor space, is clearly valuable but so are the enhanced speed of communication, improved data sharing and capacity for process automation . That’s why healthcare providers across the UK have called upon Iron Mountain’s storage and digitisation skills and experience.
A mountain of physical medical records
For example, Birmingham Children’s Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (BCH), one of the leading paediatric teaching hospitals in the UK, typically sees up to 200 patients each day. As a result, the physical records, pre-Covid, were piling up.
Sue Hobday, Head of Clinical Records and Clinical Coding at BCH, said: “If a child attends the emergency department more than once, something that often occurs, we need to access their historic files. Finding the records was time consuming and unproductive. We decided it was time to move to an electronic patient records system.”
The answer was a project that scanned around 40,000 patient records, which delivered the hoped-for performance advancements including improved information security and faster online access to patient files. The Trust now stores physical records in situ for between two and four weeks before they are scanned and filed off-site. These hard copies are fully archived for future ease of access, ensuring that their potential life-saving data is readily accessible.
Optimising change
“Although there’s an increasing move to electronic files, paper records still play a vital role and will for many years to come,” explains Brendan Sheehy, the Department of Health and Social Care’s records officer. This was underlined when England’s primary care trusts were replaced by clinical commissioning groups.
“That saw us as temporary custodian for thousands and thousands of patient records until the new organisations took responsibility,” says Sheehy. “This presented us with an ideal opportunity to consolidate our archives with a single supplier to standardise processes and gain economies of scale.”
This rationalisation and restructuring of primary care trust records has helped ensure easy access to physical records and digital patient information, as Sheehy explains: “Our records are predominantly with Iron Mountain as a single service provider and so we no longer have to search different IT systems to find what we want. It’s much simpler and more efficient.”
Having such records fully archived and digitised makes it easier to access at any point; they are more accurately classified but can also be seamlessly shared with other organisations should a data transition be needed.
A simplified approach to data retrieval
The Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust encompasses community health services, along with ownership of Queen Mary’s Hospital in Sidcup. Its ambit covers the London Boroughs of Bexley, Bromley and Greenwich; a total of 800,000 residents.
Although Queen Mary’s Hospital had stored patients’ medical history files on site, there was no purpose-built archive. Records were stored on open shelves in various locations, a far from ideal situation as they needed to be available to several organisations delivering clinical services.
“We needed to move the archive off site, improve indexation to assure records integrity, and simplify the retrieval process,” explains Julie Lucas, Information Governance Manager at Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust. Consolidating the Queen Mary’s Hospital patient files with other existing medical records would also help standardise processes and provide economies of scale.
The project involved the collection, audit and indexation of around 675,000 individual patient files, which were packed into around 30,000 storage boxes. However, consolidating patient medical records with Iron Mountain was worth the effort. It has enabled Oxleas to standardise processes, improve the quality of its records catalogue and speed-up file retrieval to improve business efficiency. Storage costs have also reduced.
“We saved around 33% across our legacy archive,” says Lucas. “We’ve been able to redeploy our archive staff and by moving files off site we’ve freed up space to be redeveloped for clinical purposes.” Overall savings are around £1.3 million per annum.
An integrated approach to digitisation
Digital patient records deliver a wide range of benefits to both clinicians and patients. However, many Trusts still have significant stores of paper records that continue to be required. A successful digital strategy must therefore seamlessly integrate the management and digitisation of paper records, now and in the future.
These examples clearly illustrate the value of an integrated approach to digitisation and the physical storage of records. Properly implemented, this methodology will help ensure that healthcare providers can successfully move to digital working while still being able to easily access information stored in physical records where required – either by retrieving hard-copy documents or by digitising those records in an integrated way. The best way to achieve this goal is by partnering with a specialist that has a proven track record of managing both physical and digital documents.
