Mid Cheshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has become the second to buy Ascribe’s eHandover solution.

The trust is a long-standing customer of the company, and will use eHandover in its emergency care division, to replace the paper-based systems that are currently used to manage the clinical handover of patients during shift changes.

The system was originally developed with Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust, where it has been used to handle more than 50,000 patient handovers.

It is built on Microsoft SharePoint technology, and centralises key information so it can be made more accessible and so enable better informed decisions to be made.

Dr Shirley Hammersley, a consultant acute physician at the trust, said the implementation had been made possible by a bid to Medical Education England and its Better Training, Better Care project.

“It is this partnership of specific training and an efficient system that will ultimately improve patient care,” she said.

eHandover won the ‘best use of IT to promote patient safety’ category of the EHI Awards 2011 in association with BT. Ascribe recently won the 2012 Microsoft Public Sector Health Partner of the Year Award, from more than 3,000 entrants worldwide.