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MISL, a UK-based bureau and BPO provider, has carried out one the fastest medical records digitisation projects in the UK for The Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trusts. It will have scanned all of The Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trusts' patient medical records by Christmas 2015 which is two years ahead of schedule. Taking just 21 months, this is a significant achievement given around 750,000 patient files will have been digitised totalling some 300 million images.

One of the most famous medical centres in the country, The Royal Free is a teaching hospital located in Hampstead, North London. It offers world-class clinical expertise in kidney, liver and bone marrow transplants, breast and plastic surgery, and the treatment of tumours. It has achieved a number of 'firsts' in the UK - the first hospital to carry out a liver transplant between a live adult donor and a patient and the first to introduce a PET scan for breast cancer. Every year it treats around 68,000 inpatients and 500,000 outpatients.

RECORDS AT THEIR FINGERTIPS
Will Smart, The Royal Free's chief information officer says, "Digitising our medical records library is in line with the Government's QIPP agenda, Jeremy Hunt's challenge that Trusts should be 'paper lite' and, of course, our desire to keep improving patient care. Fast access to notes via computers delivers this and means our clinicians now have patient records right at their fingertips."

MISL won the significant £4.5 million contract to provide document scanning services to The Royal Free in November 2013. Its team then worked closely with the hospital during a comprehensive planning phase to advise, agree and test the most effective processes for digitising records. Actual scanning started in early 2015. The initiative has involved scanning the hospital's entire medical records archive and the ongoing scanning of patient information as new clinical notes are created, so-called day forward scanning.

Originally the project was expected to take five years but MISL will complete the project early given the new processes put in place, the hard work of staff and investment in new technology which has boosted bureau productivity by over 20%. MISL's team has worked 24 hours a day in three shifts five days a week.

MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH
To meet the specific contractual requirements, MISL hired new staff, leased a new building dedicated to the project and bought new IT equipment - an investment totalling £500,000. As part of this, MISL selected Kodak Alaris as it strategic scanner partner. It purchased five Kodak i5600 and six Kodak i5800 production scanners along with Kodak Capture Pro Network Edition imaging software.

Steven Clarke, MISL's sales & marketing director, says, "So that we hit our agreed SLA's, minimised downtime, enhanced productivity and ensured we met BS10008 rules, we upgraded to the latest Kodak scanners. Dealing with medical records is not like scanning invoices or bank statements. You're potentially playing with some-one's life if there isn't the level of quality in the images scanned. It's very easy to forget this which is why we wanted the best equipment to do the job."

MISL designed the project internally to function from a single, secure and dedicated industrial unit in Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire. The unit was procured and fitted out to the highest security standards to incorporate the storage of documents pre and post scanning together with the production area. The unit was subject to significant building work and security systems were installed together with two dedicated and secured fibre optic data links to the Trust to enable the transfer of scanned data to The Royal Free's electronic document and records management (EDRM) system from Open Text.

SLAS NOT OPTIONAL
MISL agreed various SLA's with The Royal Free depending on record type. For archive scanning, it had a five day turnaround from collection to image upload, two days for day forward scanning and two hours for Accident & Emergency records on receipt of files at the MISL bureau.

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