Leeds goes digital

Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust has chosen the Alfresco Digital Business Platform to create an innovative enterprise content management solution to modernise its 3+ million patient records. This project was a significant undertaking as the Trust employs over 17,000 staff and treats over 1.6 million patients each year across seven hospitals and 175 medical facilities. Working with Alfresco, the NHS Trust’s success is paving the way for other hospitals across the UK to become paperless ‘digital hospitals’.

The Trust needed an open source-based solution that would integrate with its existing medical record solution, as well as with a digitally shared care record initiative that allows clinical staff to view healthcare information across multiple care providers and between different systems in real-time. Using Alfresco the Trust has managed to completely overhaul its records management system and has begun converting its massive volume of paper records into digital format. The Trust simply scans the information into Alfresco and then destroys the paper document, eliminating the need to store documents for years on end.

“Alfresco has been absolutely pivotal for us in dealing with our paper records,” said Rob Child, Programme Head of Digital Health Programmes, The Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. “It fits in with our paperless strategy of trying to get everything converted to digital. We can scan information into Alfresco and then destroy the paper document.”

“Out of the hospital’s 17,000 clinical and operational staff, some 10,000 will interact with the Alfresco platform,” said Jay Bhatt, Chief Executive Officer, Alfresco. “We are pleased to see the direct impact of our technology on the NHS and to be able to make the work of medical professionals that much easier, so they can focus on what they do best, caring for those who need medical attention.” 

The Trust partnered with SynApps Solutions to design a process flow within the Alfresco Digital Business Platform to track and manage content, making information easily searchable. They are also working to improve the process of creating online medical leaflets that includes a template that asks questions enabling clinical teams to collaborate together to design a truly patient centred leaflet. 

“It’s very exciting to have a product like this that can help us get content out and share it easily.  We’re talking now with different departments about their processes to see if they can also be digitized. We want one platform to help solve all of our business problems. Anytime a problem is presented, we ask – can Alfresco do that? If it can, then that’s the way we want to go,” continued Child. 

Later this year, the Trust expects to start uploading all of its 10 TB of data and scanning its extensive warehouse full of paper records into Alfresco, making the platform its primary patient record repository. This is the largest NHS organization in the UK to use this technology and become fully digitized.