Therapists in the East Lothian and Midlothian Community Health Partnerships will be the first Scottish users of a centralised referral and appointment booking call centre, using an appointment module from Ethitec’s Tiara9 electronic patient record system.
The East and Midlothian Physiotherapy Services has been using the Tiara 9 EPR system since 1995 and felt that the time was right to replicate the centralised approach first demonstrated in Leicester.
East and Midlothian physiotherapy manager, Brian Brockie, told E-Health Insider Primary Care: “We have 13 clinics which need to be managed, some are single handed, others have just two or three therapists. It occurred to us that the task of making appointments over the telephone was a heavy pressure on workloads, and we felt that in order to relieve the stress we had to invest further in eHealth and create this one referral centre, which would be able to produce user defined confirmation letters at the press of a button.
“We needed to improve patient choice and reduce bureaucracy. The aim was to give all therapists in the community real-time access to all clinic diaries, enabling them to allocate and update appointments as required. We spent between three and six months consulting with staff and the community partnership board before creating the call centre staffed by fully trained administrators for our department.”
The partnership now uses a new centralised operation to manage all new physiotherapy outpatient referrals, with the exception of mental health and learning disabilities, ensuring that they are all made through the call centre.
Once a referral is made into the service, a senior clinician at the central office prioritises this as either routine, soon or urgent, applies the appropriate diagnostic codes, and allocates patients to their local, chosen or most appropriate department to receive their physiotherapy treatment.
The next step is for the administration team to log the referral on to Tiara9, which automatically identifies and issues the appropriate letter according to the estimated waiting time. Where the referral is an urgent priority, the call centre team immediately contacts the patient to book an appointment over the phone, which is recorded straight on to Tiara9.
Ethitec’s commercial director, Simon Taylor, told EHIPC: “The new call centre enhances Tiara9 and offers improved efficiency through less time taken for referrals to go back and forward. It gives transparent visibility, allowing clinicians to easily notice available appointment times and pro-actively offer these to the patients. This reduces the number of Did Not Attends and offers more efficient use of the clinician’s time. It is less frustrating and means less paperwork. With patient choice increasingly high on the NHS agenda, this sets a best practice standard for other services to follow.”
The appointment booking module and central call centre replace East and Midlothian’s old paper based appointment system, which required several phone calls when attempting to change the clinic location.
Brockie said: “The physiotherapist no longer has to use their best professional guess as to how long they need to allocate for new appointments each week. Tiara9 gives everyone 100% visibility. The centre is responsible for all new appointments, which gives the clinician confidence in booking repeat appointments in the available slots they can see on Tiara9 – rather than saving appointments to accommodate potential new referrals which may never actually materialise.
“Patients also have a better experience with a one-stop shop for their first contact with the service and there is both equity and transparency in the appointment process.”
Brockie told EHIPC that he would like to take the scheme a step forward and introduce electronic referrals linked to their use of the SCI Gateway, however this will take time as clinician concerns must first be resolved before the boards can consider such an option.
Ethitec meanwhile are expected to announce the pilot of its newly developed link between EMIS’s GP system and Ethitec’s Tiara9 system in the coming weeks, after unveiling the link at the Healthcare Computing conference last month. The development will enable a more seamless referral process between primary care and therapy services.
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