Mid-Cheshire Hospitals NHS Trust has upgraded its iCS patient administration system to cope with P1R2 (phase 1, release 2) of Choose and Book.
As a result of the upgrade, the trust, based over two sites in Crewe, will now be able to access and review the referral information attached to the electronic appointment messages sent by the GP, personalising the service for patients.
Silverlink Software, who provide the trust’s patient administration system, says it believes the installation of a P1R2-compliant hospital system under Connecting for Health is the first in England. After the success of this initial pilot, the company will now concentrate on upgrading the other hospital trusts using their software.
P1R2 of the Choose and Book system differs from the P1R1 release in that it has enhanced messaging capability and better support for referrals, as well as including GP referral information. The upgrade also means that GPs can refer patients to particular clinicians.
Silverlink confirmed to EHI that CfH signed off on the implementation and now have provided them with appropriate authority to deploy. The trust completed the implementation on 15 February.
The system, iCS, is supplied under contract to the trusts from iSoft, who provide the software from Silverlink under a marketing agreement. Silverlink themselves are a separate company with 100% of the shares owned by employees.
A spokesperson for Mid Cheshire NHS Trust explained the difference between P1R1 and P1R2: "The service provider clinicians at the Trust can now choose to view referrals that are for patients booked into their clinic instead of seeing a full list of all referrals to that service, and have the option to view their colleagues too.
"This is very good use of resource as a clinician can cover for periods when part of the clinical team is not available to review their worklist but can clearly see by using the filter option which referrals are relevant for which clinician."
Neil Borthwick, IT projects and applications manager at Mid Cheshire, explained the differences for GPs and the Choose & Book booking hotline: "What happened previously was that GPs couldn’t select by clinician. Now you can select the clinician you want and it only brings up their slots.
"For pooled services, when you get a number of clinicians working within a pool, you can select by the service and you can see all of the clinicians."
On the trust’s side, the referral system is also much more specific: "Our clinicians can look at and see just their referrals… it allows use to manage activity much better.
"If you get a clinician and the patient comes in to see that clinicians, we want to make sure that the right clinicians looks at that referral."
John Evitt, managing director at Tyneside-based Silverlink Software, told E-Health Insider: "The key thing from our point of view is that we have sat quiet for a long time, but we just thought it was about time we blew our own trumpet a little."
"When NPfIT announced the preferred supplier it became obvious to them that they would have to get existing system suppliers to go for compliance to help them continue working," Evitt added.
The software is an acute integrated care system use in several hospitals across the country including North West London Hospitals NHS Trust and West Dorset. It features several modules, which include specialist systems for radiology, child health, neurophysiology and maternity.
The iCS software is installed in ten sites across England; six of which are currently operational with the first version of the Choose & Book software.