Health Service Focus

No more staring at photocopiers

South Tyneside NHS Foundation Trust has taken a big step on the paperless journey and thinks it will save tens of thousands of pounds a year by digitising its board papers. NHE spoke to the trust’s director of information services, Martin Alexander.

South Tyneside NHS Foundation Trust has an executive board of directors and a full board, the meetings of which can require a pack of papers with 60 items, each of which may have 200 or 300 pages of documents associated with them, from businesses cases and national guidelines to performance reports.

It could take a member of administration staff up to a week just to prepare the papers for a single meeting, not to mention the cost of the paper and the post and the “logistical nightmare” of getting the right documents to the right people.

As trust IT director Martin Alexander put it: “We were employing admin staff to do things of no real value: staring at a photocopier.”

The trust’s leadership decided in summer 2013 that it could not go on like this, and started searching for new ways of dealing with
board papers. Alexander said: “The objective was extremely simple: we wanted board members to have access to the papers on an iPad, and for the whole process of publishing to be managed electronically. We created a very simple set of requirements and went out searching for a solution.”

It considered Dropbox and offerings from Google and Microsoft, but ran up against information governance issues – those companies tend to host their data in the USA, which does not meet NHS requirements. “We need to know the data’s going to reside in the UK,” Alexander said.

It chose to go with a service provided by Huddle, a British company founded in east London seven years ago, which now has 100,000 business users worldwide plus large chunks of the UK and US governments.

Huddle has an “active strategy” to base its date centres in the UK, its director of global corporate communications Lucy Wimmer told us. “We’ve got UK data centres primarily because nearly a third of our business is government and NHS, so we can’t at all serve that sector properly if we don’t have data centres in the UK. We’re pan-government accredited at IL2. To get that, you have to have your data stored in the UK. Our US servers are for our US clients.”

Bring your own device

The system is set up to be accessed on any device, including personal devices. For board members without tablets, though, the trust bought iPads to give them. The speed of deployment was startling – the trust started looking at Huddle in July 2013, signed up in August, and was using the system for its board meetings just a few weeks later.

Alexander said: “The user experience so far is great, with no complaints. We’ve just ordered another 26 Huddle licences for the next
tier down: we’ll have 50 users on the system very soon.

“We think, incrementally, this will build up. The business case should be there. Our whole management forum is 155 managers at various levels in the trust. We think if we rolled this out ‘big bang’, it would pay for itself within two years.”

The precise contract value cannot be disclosed, but the trust’s business case to use this software for all of its meetings, even accounting for buying new iPads every two years, sees it breaking even by the middle of year three and saving £40,000 to £44,000 a year after that. These savings come primarily from staff time and consumables costs (it is saving 20 boxes of paper and a third of a member of staff FTE a month just for the two boards currently using it). “There are hundreds of meetings a year all over the organisation, so this could significantly reduce administration costs,” Alexander said.

More money for patient care

He added: “The NHS has an objective to go paperless by 2018. The work we’re doing is part of that national objective; this reduces non-care costs, and means this money can go straight back into patient care.

“It’s a really good example of an initiative driven from the top: the chairman and chief executive took the lead on this, on changing
the way we do business. We’re digitising clinical processes – we all have to change.”

Alexander added that the initial strategy was to focus on simple document-sharing, but Huddle has more functionality than this,
such as collaborative meetings, diary management and workflow. “We wanted to start simple, but certainly, users are starting
to take advantage of those features anyway. It’s viral.

“But we think it’s best to keep it simple first while we introduce it, and introduce those other functions further down the line, as
they’re slightly more difficult to understand and use.

“We believe exploiting consumer technologies such as iPads and apps is the future. This is a good example of introducing software as a service and how it can rapidly change the way you do things.”