Birmingham Children's Hospital: digitizing files to enhance child welfare

Digital Files Enhance Child Welfare

Birmingham Children’s Hospital

Challenge

With 45,000 emergency attendances annually, paper medical records had become complex to manage and store

Solution

Managed scanning and hosting service, enabling instant retrieval of digitised emergency admission records

Value

• Faster access to vital clinical information
• Increased speed and quality of patient welfare decision-making
• Improved staff productivity and space utilisation

Centre of excellence

Birmingham Children’s Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (BCH) is one of the leading pediatric teaching hospitals in the UK and a recognised centre of excellence for children with cancer, cardiac, renal and liver disease.

The hospital creates comprehensive paper-based records – a booklet containing up to 15 pages documenting the circumstances of the medical emergency, patient injuries, test results, treatment and ongoing care plans. These records were being filed in storage boxes and held onsite for six months and then transferred to an Iron Mountain® records management facility for long-term safekeeping.

Simplifying the move to electronic patient records

With the emergency department typically seeing up to 200 patients each day, the records were piling up, occupying valuable space that could have been better used for clinical purposes. Furthermore, with up to 400 patient files stored in each box and up to 100 boxes kept in the storage facility at any time, document retrieval was far from straightforward.

Sue Hobday, Head of Clinical Records and Clinical Coding at BCH, explains: “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.”

Ensuring control and patient confidentiality

Fortunately, BCH didn’t need to look far for a solution. Guided by Iron Mountain document management specialists, it developed a plan for the back-scanning project. “The bonus was that Iron Mountain was already holding some of the records we needed to scan, which would improve the efficiency of the process,” adds Sue.

Now, once files are scanned, an advanced optical character recognition system matches the file to the patient’s unique hospital number and enables the creation of other metadata fields to complete the record. The files are then uploaded to the Iron Mountain digital records centre for images (DRCI) platform.

Authorised BCH staff are able to access patient files through a secure web-based portal using a patient’s name and/or hospital number. For added patient confidentiality, as well as normal access controls, patient records can only be printed from the Iron Mountain DRCI by a strictly controlled group of accredited staff.