West London NHS Trust Customer Story

West London NHS Trust, formerly West London Mental Health NHS Trust, is one of the most diverse providers of mental and physical healthcare in the UK, providing integrated services through 30 sites throughout West London and beyond. The Trust cares for over 99,000 people every year across 10 London boroughs and employs around 3,500 staff.

Challenge

As the leading provider of a wide range of mental health and community services in the UK, West London NHS Trust provides care for thousands of people each year and employs over 3,500 staff members across multiple sites. 

The Trust had been using Documentum for its document and patient records management since around 2012, but needed a more modern and cost effective solution to integrate with Rio, its patient administration system. The Trust began searching for a new enterprise content management platform that would increase accuracy and productivity and improve overall service delivery. 

“Our user base could tell that it was an old product and there were issues with usability and accessibility,” said Graham Birrell, the Trust’s longtime central records and EDMS manager. “We needed something more modern that would give us more capability when it came to storing and managing patient records.”

Solution

Before implementing Alfresco, there was no way for users to search text in the Trust’s millions of documents and individual patient records. Instead, records had to be searched by file name, which was often random and inconsistent. 

“This made it very difficult to find documents and the reporting side of the platform was unusable,” said Birrell. “Users simply could not access the information they needed.”

About 18 months ago, the Trust decided to replace Documentum with Alfresco because of its overall capabilities, usability, open source platform and its ability to seamlessly integrate with the company intranet and existing patient administration system. The platform officially went live last month with the help of veteran Alfresco partner, SynApps Solutions. 

“With Alfresco, our Alfresco Administrators are now able to act as registration authorities for the Trust,” said Birrell. “They can simply punch a number into the app that we created and it automatically creates an account in Alfresco. We are just starting to scratch the surface of what we can integrate with the platform.”

Results

Today, the Trust is primarily using Alfresco as a document repository, housing all kinds of documents with varying permissions and accessibility requirements. The plan is to ultimately extend the platform to other areas of the business.

“Right now, Alfresco is acting as a repository for our clinical and employee records, but we will soon push it out to the rest of the business,” said Birrell. “Today, we can effectively control access to our patient records, which works very well for us. Eventually, our intent is to also have governance and compliance services sit on top of the repository, which will be automatically and centrally controlled by Alfresco.”

For the Trust, partnering with SynApps helped them move quickly, getting the Alfresco platform up and running in just over three months.

“SynApps’ knowledge of where we were coming from and what we wanted to do helped us move very quickly. They were very easy to communicate with and have a wealth of technical expertise,” said Birrell. “Now that Alfresco is in place, we are able to innovate and address other areas of the business to see how we can leverage the platform to make other processes more efficient. We are very impressed with Alfresco and would definitely recommend it.”