Hinchingbrooke Health Care NHS Trust is delivering vital discharge information to GPs within hours instead of weeks, thanks to a successful electronic record-sharing initiative powered by EMIS Health. Using the Correspondence Hub solution, which enables digital delivery of previously manual correspondence, the Trust is already speeding up the delivery of documents, including discharge letters, which used to take two weeks to reach GPs. They now arrive electronically within 24 hours.
Following this success, the Trust is now focused on achieving its paperless goals and improving communication across healthcare settings by integrating electronic document and record management (EDRM) into its electronic patient record (EPR) system, both provided by EMIS Health.
The EDRM solution will be integrated to all key clinical systems in secondary care, automatically populating each patient’s digital patient case note and where applicable, securely sharing clinical documents and correspondence across the local health economy, wherever patients are being cared for. Document capture technology will digitise existing paper records and make them more accessible.
By sharing patient information digitally across multiple healthcare settings, the Trust expects to improve patient care and safety, and deliver cost savings through efficiencies.
Gordon Greaves, Associate Director of IT at the trust, says: "The GP letters solution has been a fantastic piece of work that has quickly enabled us to meet our targets - all information can now be submitted within 24 hours, from a process that used to take up to two weeks for letters to get to the GP.
"By enhancing our EPR system further with EMIS Health's EDRM solution, we can truly integrate and digitise our clinical data and have one complete, instantly accessible patient record, removing the associated cost and resources associated with storing paper based records."
Bettina Fitt, Director of Markets and Commercial for EMIS Health commented: "Trusts are under pressure to deliver digital records with EDRM, to recognise the well documented benefits. We are helping our customers to determine optimum operating models, removing the associated costs of a paper centric service, whilst managing transformation to improve patient safety through delivery of a single integrated patient record, easily shared between all healthcare settings. We look forward to working with Hinchingbrooke to implement our EDRM solution so they can start to realise the benefits of a paperless EPR."
Related news articles:
- EMIS' Profile
About EMIS Health
EMIS Health is part of EMIS Group plc - the UK leader in connected healthcare software and services.
EMIS Health provides software and services to clinicians working across every major UK healthcare setting, including:
- Primary Care - market leader with 53% share of the UK GP market; its systems hold 40 million cradle to grave patient records;
- Community Children's and Mental Health Care - 8% and growing UK market share;
- Secondary Care - 81% of NHS Acute Trusts use an EMIS Health system; its software holds 30 million patient records in A&E alone;
- Community Pharmacy - the single most used integrated community pharmacy and retail system (36% UK market share);
- Specialist Care - EMIS Health is the leading provider of software and services to support diabetic eye screening (82% English market share) and other ophthalmology and specialist services.
EMIS Health is an innovator in secure data-sharing to join up healthcare. It was the first in the UK to enable community pharmacists to access information from the GP patient record - supporting safer dispensing - and the first to integrate personal health data captured on wearable consumer devices with the GP patient record.
About Hinchingbrooke Health Care NHS Trust
Hinchingbrooke Health Care NHS Trust provides care for a population of 160,000 people of Huntingdonshire and surrounding areas.
Patients can access a wide range of specialties at Hinchingbrooke, including General Surgery, Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT), Ophthalmology, Orthopaedics, Urology, Vascular, Plastics, Breast Surgery and Gynaecology. The hospital has 304 beds, as well as 23 cabins located in the Treatment Centre, a new specialist unit which opened in 2005.
On 31 March 2015, private company Circle withdrew from the operating franchise under which they had managed Hinchingbrooke for three years. The hospital returned to NHS management on 1 April 2015.