A Surrey community provider has built an interface out of RiO to send digital discharge summaries to GPs.
Central Surrey Health estimates savings of £40,000 over two years by sending letters electronically via PCTI’s Electronic Document Transfer Hub, director of IT Mike Davis told the National Docman User Group Conference in London last week.
The community provider uses CSE Healthcare’s RiO electronic patient record system, but did not receive it through NPfIT.
It spent £20,000 building an interface out of the system, which can now be used by other trusts using RiO.
GP practices in the area were already using PCTI’s Docman, which can receive the letters and insert them directly into the doctor’s workflow, and 94% are connected to the hub.
Around 30,000 documents have been sent electronically over the past ten months.
Davis said the aim of the hub project was to make it easier for GPs to do business with Central Surrey by removing paper from the system. “We had so much paper going around it was ridiculous,” he explained.
The organisation is realising financial and time savings from not using paper to print and post letters and expected pay back on its £40,000 investment after two years.
Davis added that it was the simplest project he had been involved with from a technical point of view.
Central Surrey is expanding the use of the integration to cover other areas and has already sent 5000 clinical documents via the hub.
Davis said it was also looking to use EDT to receive referral letters from GPs as only 45% of referrals were being made using Choose and Book. The provider covers 37 GP practices and a population of 300,000.