Frimley Park Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has extended its use of electronic patient record system Tiara9 to a new therapy outreach service.
The deployment means that records started for in-patients can continue to be updated once the patient is discharged back into the community.
Val Sharples, occupational therapy manager for Frimley Park, said therapy services at the trust started using Ethitec’s Tiara9 for inpatients in April 2009. Use of the EPR has gradually been expanded to include clinical noting in a range of specialist areas and is used by around 250 clinicians.
“We have realised huge benefits since we introduced EPR and without doubt, the greatest value is in having one joined-up clinical record that can easily be accessed by multi-professional teams,” she said.
Therapists in the community can work with the electronic records offline, which is particularly useful because 3G connections in the area are very unreliable. Sharples said community staff download the records of their patients for the day before leaving base, giving them access to the person’s entire therapy record while on home visits.
She said this has benefits for patient care and safety as staff can now enter the information once while in a patient’s home and it will automatically upload when they have an internet connection.
Frimley is set to become one of the first hospitals in the country to introduce direct Choose and Book to its therapy services and will be the 'first of type' test site for Tiara9 spine compliance testing, due to start very soon. Sharples said it is also looking to introduce electronic discharges for GPs directly out of the system.
The therapy EPR does not integrate with other systems at the trust, but Frimley is introducing a clinical portal where clinicians will be able to view patient information from various departments. It is also introducing an electronic document management system as part of a collaboration with two other southern trusts.
Sharples said that when these are in place it will reduce the need for paper notes at the trust even further.