Experts discuss transformation at the “Discovering the art of the possible: the paperlight journey” event
Guest post by Jonathan Elliott, General Manager, Health Sector at Xerox UK, @jonelliott276
This month, Xerox UK’s healthcare sector team hosted several NHS organizations for the “Discovering the art of the possible: the paperlight journey” event at our UK innovation center. Here’s a brief rundown:
- Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust discussed how they’re transforming digital and paper patient communications.
- Monica Beltrametti and Mario Jarmasz from our Xerox Research Centre Europe showcased the latest innovations in digital healthcare.
- Head of Health and Social Care at techUK, Adrian Baker explained how digital transformation will change how healthcare is delivered.
- I facilitated a roundtable on how we can work better together to meet NHS digital goals.
As you can imagine, it was a full agenda. Here are a few of the insights and observations I took away from the day.
Six Digital Insights for Healthcare:
1. Digital disruption: Use analytics to examine where costly processes are broken and understand how to improve them.
The NHS is far from your average enterprise. Delivering the highest level of patient care requires an efficient clinical and administrative operation, removed from immense quantities of paper. Getting a view on paper workflows is the first step in streamlining how such processes can be better managed, when working towards the end goal of providing clinicians and administrators with easy, secure access to medical records from any location, at any time.
2. Improving the back office directly affects the patient experience.
Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust realized this as they looked to improve the patient experience while reducing costs. “Outpatient care typically starts with an appointment letter – and suffers if the letter is late or doesn’t arrive at all,” said Ruby Dey, Program Management Office (PMO) Manager, Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that Xerox is helping us deliver better patient care with its hybrid mail service.”
3. Take control where you can.
Issues related to franking mail brought Ruby’s attention to the error-prone, manual, time-consuming process the Trust used to send outpatient appointment letters. This kick-started a desire to improve the way the Trust communicates with patients. This desire turned into a new hybrid mail service that saves the Trust 50 percent every year in direct costs. It also has reduced the amount of time spent on patient complaints about late or missing letters.
4. Innovation in healthcare depends on NHS organizations and private sector working closely together.
The roundtable discussion made it clear that introducing innovation is top of mind for trusts and suppliers. But it’s challenging as the NHS shifts priorities to deal with different crisis. Many agreed that pursuing a sustainable transformation program is a good starting point. NHS Trusts also looks to suppliers to bring people together and facilitate conversations on innovation. Forums like this event help, but we realize there is more to do, and so our team is looking at ways in which we can make this happen, including a Google+ hangout, which we’ll keep you posted on.
5. Some NHS Trusts didn’t realize how many processes are related to paper and how powerful transforming these processes could be.
There were a few comments along these lines during the roundtable. Digitization within this context, they realized, is not about following a set of procedures. It’s also not complex and long term. But getting a visual on paper processes and identifying the manual workflows draining valuable resources are key starting points for those in the industry looking to get a strong handle on their processes.
6. A One Size Fits All approach will not work.
NHS Trusts agree they’re similar, but also very different from each other. After all, the NHS employs 1.5 million people ,and the roles of clinicians and administrators differ from trust to trust, as do the operating paper-based records systems. A “one size fits all” approach isn’t going to work because of the complexity of the IT infrastructures in place, so naturally, lasting digital strategies will be implemented at different stages. Although each of the trusts is working towards the same paperless goal, progress and timing vary. We may not be able to take the same approach, but we can learn from each other and share our war stories.
