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East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust will be implementing 6PM’s iFIT Health Records Tracking Solution, supported by passive radiofrequency identification tags (RFID), to track paper health records.
The Health Records Library staff will gain immediate efficiency savings in filing, pulling, preparing, auditing and locating the health records. iFIT is an appropriate precursor to launching the Trust’s future scanning and Electronic Document Management programme to move towards electronic records. This investment is required to meet efficiency savings, improve storage of the records and meet Health and Safety and Information Governance compliance.
Health records will no longer be filed in number sequence; instead a ‘location based filing’ system will be introduced within the libraries at each site. Once records are returned to the libraries they will be filed in the ‘next available’ space on the shelves. This will significantly reduce the amount of time filing clerks will spend re-filing notes. It will also eradicate the shelf management tasks needed to snake and re-label shelves throughout the libraries.
Trying to locate notes is a time consuming process. With iFIT this is reduced to an absolute minimum. Using handheld RFID guns, the medical records team will be able to find a set of notes in the libraries or in the offices, ensuring that availability of patient notes will not delay treatment of care to patients.
The Trust is commencing its journey to an electronic patient record, with the implementation of Electronic Document Management and scanning of the health record. Effective delivery of this strategic change will be dependent on implementation of iFIT to provide a full paper record inventory, under full control and rationalisation. This allows the Trust to identify all records, any duplicates that require merging and where they are located. iFIT will reduce the cost of the Trust’s scanning programme by providing the information to choose which records and which parts of the records should be scanned.
With the passive RFID network in place within key entrance and exit points of the Trust’s estates, East Sussex will be able to utilise iFIT to track medical devices, bed frames, mattresses, wheelchairs, pathology samples, vulnerable patients – anything that moves around the hospitals. This will provide cost efficiencies, improve the service provided to the patient and reduce clinical risk.
Steve Wightman, Deputy CEO of 6PM plc commented: “iFIT is the ideal vehicle to provide the foundations for a benefit driven scanning strategy and presents the clinicians with a single integrated view of what information is available in both an electronic and paper format.”
