I’m interested to hear from anyone working at NZ DHBs who have already introduced scanning systems for either scan on discharge, or back scanning of old notes, particularly on clincial usability of the system.
Do you view your scaned records from within the Orion Clinical Portal (“Concerto” etc) or from a different system?
If from with the Clinical Portal, are the scanned documents integrated into the document tree, or do you have a tab to “click through” to access a separate viewer from patient context (or a combination of both)?
What are the good and not so good features of your system which helps or hinders with clinical usability of viewing scanned records?
I have heard that Hutt and Waikato have a scanning system, and ADHB has had one for some time. In the South Island, Nelson has one. I’m interested to hear from anyone at these or other DHBs who have one.
Before leaving to study, our clinical records were working on a new policy and framework that took a big digital picture for managing the transition to online records. Sandra Pugh would be a good contact for you.
As you say, Damon we have a system in Nelson. We’ve been doing ‘Front scanning’ i.e. all new paper generated from a point in time
is scanned rather than filed. We’ve done this for 2 years now for the hospitals activity including OPD except for Opthalmology who we are bringing in now along with Mental Health. This is regularly referenced e.g. by Anaesthetists and is searchable by file
title or typed content (OCR)
We are also now looking at ‘backscanning’ records but this needs more careful consideration and is a long-term exercise however set
up.
The ‘third way’ is to use the scanning software as a ‘middleman’ capturing / receiving eDocuments directly (not via the scanning machines)
and sending them to the ‘appropriate home’ which generally might be HCS or our eRecords. Examples might be:
Our Clinicians can view these records via the Concerto Portal (Tab and Click through or via the documents tree), Or
Via the MCP (Midlands Clinical Portal) using the MCP document tree which are documents have been mapped to and uploaded from Webpas,
The Good the Bad and the Ugly?
The Good:
To the user the MCP feels more like an integrated system than a window to several disparate systems, and the scanned documents appear as part of that integrated system.
The additional ways of viewing documents in MCP has also proved popular with the Timeline option being most notable,
The Bad:
The Concerto system has evolved over time with bits added rather than designed from scratch which makes it a less intuitive system making it difficult to find individual items such as scanned documents if you are not fully conversant with it.
The MCP document tree does not make the home location of documents very clear (Taranaki, Waikato, Lakes DHB etc) so it can be difficult to get a good handle on what document originates where and you may have to step back and look at the by individual location to understand the full picture and patient journey.
The Ugly
Well nothing yet but who knows …
I have screen shots from our test system that I can share.
Thanks for your reply @bev although I think it got truncated.
Are you doing any “middleman” capturing with your current system? It would be good to use this to capture inbound faxes, and electronic document outputs from other systems that don’t easily go into Health Connect South automatically.