Peter Mann
Digital Strategy Lead, Xerox
Digitise health records with a comprehensive automation service. Save time and costs and reduce carbon footprint while ensuring accurate, accessible patient data for superior care.
As the NHS continues to work through a backlog of medical procedures and increasing demand for services, it is more important than ever to recognise the digital-first ambitions laid out in the NHS Long Term Plan. Digital technology has the potential to offer more productive, systematic and individualised healthcare systems, contributing to the heightened call for sustainable healthcare.
Health records automation service
Peter Mann, Digital Strategy Lead at Xerox, offers insights into the work being done alongside numerous NHS trusts to digitise patient records and its importance for effective clinical practice.
Xerox provides a unique health records automation service, taking full responsibility for the management and facilitation of digitising paper medical records. The service affords doctors and nurses the time they truly need to focus on patient care.
Benefits of health record digitisation
The advantages of health record digitisation come in many forms, with time being the most critical. Alongside this are huge cost savings in admin and storage fees, significant carbon savings and the ability to ensure the accuracy and availability of medical data at all times.
The integrated care system has the structure available for multi-facility, multidisciplinary access, with features allowing for automated letters, virtual consultations and direct room bookings. Moreover, as AI develops, the possibilities will expand — as long as patient data is available in a digital format.
The integrated care system has
the structure available for multi-facility,
multidisciplinary access.
Investing in a paperless NHS
According to the most recent NHS annual survey, £238 million is spent each year on storage for paper health records. Mann highlights the importance of ‘acknowledging that figure.’ A paperless NHS is not yet a reality, as it requires time and resources to implement — and Xerox is striving to take the reigns.
Harnessing the potential of AI
In an age where technology is rapidly advancing, we need patient data to be digitised to harness AI’s potential in eliciting high-level care. Considering a new AI project for the detection of early signs of pre-eclampsia, Mann explains: “A paper record cannot facilitate the recognition of pre-eclampsia in this way; the data has to be digitised for this initiative to work. Paper health records are the slowest moving object in a rapidly moving healthcare system.”
In embracing this ambition, the imperative to digitise health records becomes clear, offering efficiency gains and cost savings and unlocking AI’s potential to deliver patient-focused and sustainable healthcare solutions.
Xerox is supporting the NHS in drawing in a new era of sustainable healthcare. Find out more on xerox.co.uk/health
