Liverpool speeds up results reporting

Liverpool Community Health NHS Trust has launched a new system to speed up the delivery of neonatal screening results for newborns.

Together with EMIS and the Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust, it has developed a secure mailbox that receives results electronically and inputs them directly into the child’s record.

Peter Woods, information management and technology senior project manager for Informatics Merseyside, said the new mailbox system will make the results reporting process much easier.

“Introducing this solution means that now we only need to enter data once for each child, where previously it had to be entered multiple times by different departments and teams,” he said.

The Healthy Child Programme means every baby goes through a routine screening after it is born.

Previously, laboratories had to post all baby screening results to the trust for reporting purposes and the results were manually inputted into an electronic system and provided to health visitors as a paper record.

“Not only is it enabling us to speed up our baby screening process by between two and five days on average, and enabling us to get results back to families much quicker, it’s also helping to significantly reduce paperwork,” said Woods.

“The system also removes the risk of human error in data inputting and will allow our records to be more easily audited which will help us to manage our performance better in the future.”

He added that as far as he knew they were the first trust in the UK to do this.

The pilot system is already live, but the trust will continue with paper based reports for a three month trial period to ensure the automated system maintains 100% accuracy.

If all goes to plan, the trust will make the switch to the ‘electronic only’ version from January 2013.