Ideagen to help mental health and community trust meet paperless NHS targets and reduce reliance on off-site storage suppliers‏

Software firm Ideagen is to work with South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust to reduce the volume of paper patient records in line with the NHS’s £4bn drive for paperless health services.

The Trust will implement a series of Opex scanners to be used alongside Ideagen’s document scanning solution, dartQScan, and its accompanying document management software, dartKW.

dartPortal, Ideagen’s web-based clinical content viewer, will also be launched, allowing staff at the Trust to instantly access scans through an electronic interface.

The project will help South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust not only meet the paperless target, but reduce its reliance on off-site storage suppliers and the costs involved in retrieving paper records and other documentation.

Nikki Cooper, Head of Information Services at South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, said: “This project is a significant one in that it will help us work towards achieving the NHS’ paperless requirements and also reduce the need to store and retrieve documentation off site.

“Through dartQScan, paper records will be scanned and saved on our system, allowing anyone with the correct permissions to access these electronic documents straight away or whenever needed. There should be no need to send documentation to be stored off site, and then wait to retrieve records again once required.

“Meanwhile, the dartKW software will allow us to complete our quality assurance checks on a particular document while dartPortal provides a web interface to a patient’s clinical information.”

South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust is a community, mental health, learning disability and forensic Trust that covers over one million people in the Barnsley, Calderdale, Kirklees and Wakefield areas of Yorkshire in the UK.

The project with Ideagen will see the Trust focus on legacy records initially, with a plan to replicate efforts with more current documentation at a later date.

Nikki added: “The project will see any documentation that would have been sent to offsite storage now staying on premise and being scanned into our system instead. This means that eventually all patient records will be in electronic form and able to be retrieved as and when required, rather than waiting for the document to be retrieved from storage at another site.”

Ideagen provides software and services to help over 400 global Healthcare organisations, including 75% of the UK NHS, to manage quality, safety and compliance while improving patient care outcomes and clinical e?ciency.