Surrey barcodes and tracks records

Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust has created a bespoke case notes tracking system and barcoded 60,000 records in the past nine months.

The system tracks 350,000 case notes at more than 100 trust and external sites.

Associate director for performance and knowledge management Ann Stevenson said being able to locate patient records quickly and reliably is essential to providing a safe and effective service.

Installing a single case note tracking system to log the location and movements of patient records was an objective for Surrey and Borders’ records management team since the trust formed in 2005.

The organisation’s three predecessor trusts had five separate records libraries. Case note tracking was used in two of them, three had manual systems and none were compatible with each other.

“This meant that records tended to be kept within clinical teams,” said Stevenson.

“Time was wasted chasing missing files and success or failure was often dependent on local knowledge of the teams to contact and the relevant contacts within them.”

Stevenson said the new system gives clinicians easier access to patient records so they can make better informed decisions more quickly.

There are also “considerable cost savings” in terms of time saved by staff within clinical teams on finding relevant notes, she added.

Colin Ayres of Finexe Systems was commissioned in 2009 to create the case note tracking system and to upload around 350,000 health records into it.

The system went live in October 2009 and within a few months had more than 150 users.

“The system was then built further around the valuable feedback and testing from records staff with the system gradually evolving into the finished article,” said Ayres.

The following March, Finexe upgraded its original system to include a new warehouse-style wireless barcoding facility so that files could be tracked to a specific shelf in a new library.

The trust has barcoded 60,000 records in the past nine months, with approximately 100,000 still to be included.