Going Paperless in the Pandemic

CCube Solutions is a Business Reporter client.

Paperless or paper-light records management can deliver many benefits beyond saving cabinet space.

It’s not news that many organizations are progressing their digital strategies and migrating their mission-critical systems, such as records management, to the cloud. But other organizations appear reluctant to do so. Why is this?

During the pandemic, many organizations have, perhaps understandably, been focused on other priorities such as enabling remote working or maintaining the well-being of employees. Some senior decision makers clearly feel that they are too busy to consider digitization and cloud migration just now, or that they don’t have the resources, skills or money.

The paradox here is that both digitization and moving to the cloud saves resources. Digitization enables sharing, and the cloud enables more flexible working practices, allowing employees to work anytime, from any place. IT resources can be minimized, with cloud service companies providing and maintaining networking infrastructure. These business efficiencies can quickly achieve monetary savings and generate a positive return, even in the short term.

Benefits of digital transformation

It’s clear that digital transformation can save money. By increasing efficiency, infrastructure and staffing costs can be reduced. For example, the project costs of a small project to create an electronic medical records (EMR) system for Royal Papworth Hospital—including software, support, scanners and project management—were less than the annual cost of physical paper records storage and management, thereby freeing up much-needed funds for frontline patient care resources such as additional operating theaters, nurses, etc.

But digital transformation isn’t just about saving money. It’s also about time efficiency and, importantly, quality. Digital systems in medicine, for instance, enable health professionals to locate information far more rapidly than by using paper documents. These systems also allow them access to this information wherever they are, enabling them to participate in managing an emergency even from home.

In addition, the quality of information is increased when data can simply be duplicated from one document to another, without the need for re-keying. With re-keying errors of around 3%, on average, in a health context, it’s obvious how digitization can increase safety.

Digitizing records management

One area where the cloud has proved invaluable is records management. Paper records can be expensive to store and maintain, hard to access (especially if they are stored offsite, as often happens when they become too voluminous to be stored on the premises) and prone to getting lost, or even accidentally destroyed. Digital records are much cheaper to store, as well as being far easier to access.

More importantly, digital records have considerable added value compared with paper files. Paper documents can be scanned and turned into digital text, which can then be searched and edited. This is an enormous advantage to anyone needing to trawl through large quantities of documents. Health-care professionals, lawyers and others can benefit greatly from this facility.

Even where documents are handwritten, there are benefits to scanning them beyond having easy access or saving storage space. Handwritten documents often take the form of handwriting on pre-printed documents, and the pre-printed parts of these forms can be subjected to character recognition and the valuable data (such as the document type and the headings of the sections within it) can be captured. Along with the scan data, the document itself can also be briefly described, to capture extra information. And in a file of many documents, the tabbed sections that divide the file up into sections can be recorded as a helpful index to the file’s contents.

All of this leads to real benefits for patient safety and patient care. Digital records mean that critical patient information can be accessed rapidly and from anywhere, not just in a particular clinical setting. It’s much harder for digital records to get lost through misfiling, and they make it much easier for clinicians to find the information they require. In addition, because digitization reduces the amount of data re-keying needed, digitized records are more accurate.

It’s also important to consider how stored digitized documents may be used in the future. In some cases, documents may be required for legal purposes. Scans of documents can be legally admissible, and the U.K.’s BS 10008 Standard helps verify and authenticate all such information to avoid the legal pitfalls of information storage, and outlines best practices for migrating paper records to digital files and transferring electronic information between systems.

Legacy records or new documents?

Whether or not most of an organization’s existing documents are handwritten or typed, there is a powerful argument for digitizing record processes in the future by moving to a paperless or paper-light documents policy. Professionals who are too busy to type up documents can dictate them, and a voice recognition system can automatically transcribe them into digital documents, which can be available immediately.

While it is not difficult to get started with a paperless strategy, it isn’t something that can simply be switched on. For example, information management specialist CCube spends eight to 10 weeks with client teams prior to starting the implementation phase of a new digital documents project. This enables appropriate planning to be put into place so that everyone knows what to expect. Involving end users in the system planning generally means that they are more likely to positively engage with it.

Paperless health care

In 2014, a state-of-the-art hospital opened in Southmead, Bristol, England. This major hospital soon required 1,000 paper patient records (of a total of 1.2 million in storage) to be delivered every day. This was highly inefficient, open to the risk of information loss and clearly unsustainable. CCube delivered an electronic patient records project that, as well as making patient records available to clinicians at the click of a mouse, is saving the hospital well over £1 million a year.

This type of project can seem overly ambitious; in the case of Southmead Hospital, hundreds of millions of pages of patient records needed to be scanned. Nonetheless, while this required investment up front, by the second year the hospital was saving money. Equally important, clinical staff had the confidence of knowing that the medical records they needed for a consultation would always be available to them in a readable format, with individual pages easy to find.

This type of system needs to be simple to use, and the focus should not be on the technology; to succeed, usability needs to be at its heart. The system should be intuitive to use, with minimal training required; CCube estimates that it takes less than 30 minutes for a clinician to be trained on its system.

With the right focus on delivering a usable system, digital document management can save organizations considerable money, ensure the security of documents from physical and online threats, increase the accessibility of records so that they are instantly available to authorized users, wherever they may be, and enable them to share documents with associated services at the touch of a button.

CCube Solutions supplies information management services to numerous organizations within the NHS, U.K. government and private industry. Find out more at ccubesolutions.com.

一 Industry view from CCube Solutions
_{This article originally appeared on Business Reporter. Image credits: iStock - 1263489094}