Fortrus Uses AWS to Help UK Hospital Digitize Medical Records, Ensuring Patient Safety and Compliance

Fortrus is a UK-based company that has delivered digital transformation projects to the UK public and private sectors for over 15 years. These range from bespoke software development solutions through to multimillion GBP outsource programs. As an AWS Partner Network (APN) Select Technology Partner and a member of the AWS Public Sector Partner Program, Fortrus assists customers in moving critical applications to the AWS Cloud.

Most recently, the company has helped customers to digitize their patient health records. “We have increasingly been working with providers to enable digital transformation in response to government mandates,” says Phil Clow, head of health and social care for Fortrus. “We have also helped providers move to the cloud as part of NHS Digital’s new cloud-first approach to technology.”

As an example, Fortrus was recently engaged by Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust (LWH), which serves more than 50,000 patients in Liverpool, England, and across the UK, and provides both hospital-based care and community-based clinics. The Trust stored paper health records in multiple warehouses, which made it difficult for clinicians to quickly access them. “Without immediate access, our clinicians were unlikely to have complete information about a patient at any given time,” says Jaki Allen-Free, Program Director for LWH. “In addition, our processes for storing and accessing records were manual and inefficient. We needed dedicated retrieval and transport teams to move the patient health records from storage facilities to the hospitals. On top of this, security was a concern because multiple people handled the records, so there was increased risk for personal data being leaked.”

Fortrus helped LWH solve its challenges by implementing a completely paper-free solution for patient health records management. The solution, which uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), digitizes all paper records and gives clinicians immediate, highly secure access to real-time patient information. Fortrus helped LWH electronically scan all patient information into the solution, where it is stored on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon S3 Glacier. Now, the clinicians and medical staff can access the data through the Fortrus Unity clinical application to quickly search complete patient records.

The Trust also took advantage of the NHS digital transformation framework primed by Fortrus, via a managed service contract. “As part of our offering, we provide a business case and digital roadmap consultancy, as well as architectural foundation consulting, and technology services to help our customers easily achieve their transformation objectives,” says Clow. LWH is a Global Digital Exemplar Fast Follower, a program established by NHS England to build proven digital models that can be rolled out across the NHS more broadly.

Using the Fortrus paper-free solution, LWH can give clinicians immediate access to all patient health records at the point of care. “Clinicians can use the Fortrus solution on AWS to access complete and indexed patient records in seconds, instead of spending valuable clinical time sorting through paper documents,” says Allen-Free. “Using the keyword-based search engine, they can view all health records for a patient in a single place. With the right data at the right time, in the right format, they can make better, faster decisions about patient care. Ultimately, this means more time spent with patients, which enables better health outcomes.”

Because the solution runs on the AWS Cloud, clinicians and medical staff can access patient records 24/7, no matter which facility they are working in. “Clinicians can still provide the best possible patient care even with remote consultations,” says Clow.

LWH is reducing risk and increasing compliance by using the new paper-free solution. “Employees no longer need to spend time storing and moving actual paper health records, so there are fewer opportunities for patient information to be lost, stolen, or tampered with,” says Clow. As a result, LWH can more easily comply with Health Level Seven (HL7) standards for transferring clinical data between applications. “By digitizing our records through the Fortrus solution, we have enhanced security and compliance,” says Allen-Free.

LWH looks forward to helping other NHS facilities experience the benefits of digitizing their patient records. Allen-Free concludes, “This solution will help us be a leader in terms of digital transformation best practices, and we are in the process of producing a blueprint in order to share our experiences across the NHS.”