Portsmouth NHS Trust Case Study

Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust (PHT) is the eighth largest hospital trust in England and responsible for around 1,300 hospital beds and almost 7,000 staff. It's three acute hospitals, Saint Mary's Hospital, Queen Alexandra Hospital and Royal Hospital Haslar serve up to a million people. The private Finance Initiative (PFI) Project Team at Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust (PHT) faced the daunting task of finding a partner to design, build, finance and operate the redevelopment of the Queen Alexandra Hospital site. It was decided in the early stages of the project that an Electronic Document Management system would play a crucial role in the success of the scheme.

The Queen Alexandra Hospital redevelopment scheme has an estimated capital value of Ł170m. It is a massive communications challenge, involving competitive bidders, a range of advisors, thousands of hospital staff and the public. The overwhelming potential problem was an overload of paperwork. As an example of the scale of paperwork involved, the Preliminary Invitation to Negotiate (PITN) electronic documentation comprised the equivalent of 1,300 pages. Documents relating to the PFI Project come in a wide variety of formats: Word, Excel, AutoCAD, Adobe PDF and aerial photographs. An evaluation exercise was carried out, and Invu's electronic document management system stood out from it's competitors, impressing the decision makers on ease of use, performance and cost criteria.

Solution

As a result, the Invu system was implemented. This was an integral part of the team's procurement process based on the "virtual office" concept, designed to reduce paperwork to an absolute minimum.

"The installation went without a hitch and someone was always there to ensure all users were happy with what they were doing."
Alan Reid IT Project Officer at Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust Key.

Benefits of the Invu system:

Efficiencies, time-cost savings
Security, access control
Reliability
Data easily found, multi-access, sharing of information,
improved communications to wider audience
Audit trail for performance measurement
Space-saving

The use of index fields, optical character recognition and a background indexing engine, provides a search or query facility that is highly sophisticated in terms of it's underlying technology but is easily set up and is simple to use. This relates to scanned as well as computer generated documents. Documents and files can now be found in seconds.

Invu

Invu The sheer variety of formats makes the Invu system an indispensable tool since it enables all of the document types to be managed in a single knowledge repository. Also the access systems, whilst controlled, is definable in a very specific way. InvuCare after Sales Support is very cost competitive in it's licence agreements. It's annual payment carries with it a "price promise" that if the client wishes to raise the number of users then they pay only the difference between cost for the lower and higher number of users. With some other products available on the market the licence has to be re-issued at the higher cost. Also version upgrades are free of charge. This structure allows companies to expand and develop their document management capabilities, without punitive cost implications.

Vital need for document management

The key elements of electronic document management system include scanning, filing, storing, indexing, information sharing, tracking, generating reports, multi-access, easy retrieval, user control and security. These are all immense time-savers. The indexing facility has extremely weighty implications, with the date and author attached to the documents any time it is changed. This control mechanism is becoming increasingly vital in cases where documents are legally admissible evidence in litigation matters. Audit trails and document technologies are becoming very high profile indeed, with the document management sector growing fast both in the home and international markets. Additional products within the Invu range allow users to integrate their document management system with their existing back office applications, such as financial packages and contact management software. Users, clients and customers can also remotely access information via a web module, providing wider scope for information sharing. Workflow is becoming a very important management tool and this can also be incorporated using the Invu S250 product, facilitating increased administrative controls.

The Benefits

Surveys has revealed that the information sharing of electronic files leads to improved customer satisfaction, lower costs, great regulatory compliance, efficiencies and increased revenues. The sheer volume of office space taken up with papers, folders and filing cabinets represents a signification overhead. Central Government has issued a mandate that all government departments to be "paperless offices" by year 2004/5. The beauty of the Invu system is that it does not require expensive modifications to be carried out to make it fit for use. The installation was easy, the only training required was for the systems administrator to configures what is essentially user-definable software. Specific privileges can be allocated to users depending on their need to know, or level of authority. As an on-going service, they continue to give telephone or on-line support when needed, backed up by regular visits by a dedicated Account Manager. The Invu solution will translate to other functions including patient records, statistics, clinical information, accounts, staff records, drug safety data sheets, building management systems and so on. Easy retrieval of accurate and up to date records is very important, and the efficiencies and cost-saving benefits make electronic document control an inevitability for the future. And Invu is the best tool available.

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