Partner Article

Health efficiency boost for hospitals, GPs and patients

East Cheshire NHS Trust has moved exclusively to electronic communications with Cheshire GPs, in a landmark move that will boost patient care.

Fifty-six GP practices across Cheshire are now exclusively receiving hospital correspondence and discharge summaries electronically – minimising administrative errors and risks associated with duplicate letters.

MedisecTRUST is used by the Trust to generate most of its clinical correspondence, and the GP delivery module allows practices to receive critical clinical information into their GP System using EDT Connect for processing each morning, without the need for dual keying or scanning correspondence.

Vicky Bond, Clinical Admin Manager, at East Cheshire NHS Trust said: “We are now able to create, review, sign off and deliver clinical letters and discharge summaries to every single GP practice in Cheshire in a seamless, paperless, end-to-end process.”

She added: “Bringing an end to paper correspondence has been an important strategic goal for us, and by centralising printing and taking steps to manage our sign off process, we’ve now been able to achieve this.”

Removing paper from the process endorses the electronic delivery system that has been deployed by leading NHS shared services provider, Cheshire ICT, in collaboration with Medisec Software.

The process benefits all users by improving integrity, saving valuable NHS resources, improving environmental sustainability and improving patient care.

Developed by Medisec Software, the electronic delivery system will enable surgeries to reject mail at the touch of a button if a correspondence is sent in error, or if a patient is no longer registered with a particular GP practice.

Debi Lees, Customer Service Delivery Manager, at Cheshire ICT Service, added: “Electronic delivery has led to dramatic improvements in both the speed of delivery and the quality of clinical updates. GPs have been calling for an end to paper correspondence and, in accomplishing this; we’ve reached another notable milestone in patient care and administrative efficiency.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Anthony Andrew .