Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust and Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust have gone live with a new electronic discharge system from Bluespier.
The company says it has worked closely with the two trusts, which have been customising the module for their own use. It is linked with the admission and discharge processes on the trusts’ patient administration systems via an online HL7 interface.
The company says the system fully integrates with both doctor and pharmacy processes, tracks prescribed drugs from entry by the doctor to authorisation, and deals with pharmacy validation, dispensing and several levels of checking in pharmacy and on the wards.
Drug lists can also be customised to each doctor or speciality and can use the NHS DM+D (Dictionary of Medicines and Devices) drug lists and updates or can import local formularies.
Michael Mansfield, a physician and clinical director of acute medicine at Leeds, said: “In the acute medical unit, it allows us to quickly check the status of discharges, ensuring discharge information gets to GPs speedily even when patients require no discharge medication.
“We can quickly find information about previous admissions to our unit as well as pending outpatient appointments in other services.”
In Leeds, the final discharge letters will be sent electronically to GPs via Indigo 4 in the Kettering format.
In Worcester, a GP link is being developed. The interface will take advantage of inter-operability work being carried out in conjunction with the trust’s interface team, and will allow any document to be sent directly to GPs via Docman.
John Thornbury, director of ICT at Worcestershire Health added: “All those involved both at the trust and within Bluespier have put in a great effort to develop the processes, interfaces and make necessary configuration changes in Bluespier to enable the interoperability that we are striving towards.”
The news comes as the Care Quality Commission published its first annual report on the state of care in England detailing that almost 50% of GPs are not receiving discharge summaries from acute trusts in time for them to be useful.
Prior to the report, EHI identified that almost as few as 20% of acute trusts could be delivering discharge summaries within 24 hours by 1 April, despite a contractual obligation to do so.
Link: Bluespier