Community

Comprehensive patient data at the point of care

Challenge

The NHS is currently facing a multitude of inter-related issues such as efficient multi-disciplinary team working, social care integration and effective information sharing between primary and secondary care. There is real need to increase productivity to counter the financial pressures that will affect the service from 2011. To resolve these issues many organisations are now remodelling community services to deliver increased care outside of traditional settings, by utilising multi-disciplinary teams and new methods of care delivery. A major obstacle for healthcare professionals working in the community is that they have little or no information about their patients at the point of care which creates inefficiencies and hinders the modernisation and streamlining of services.

Solution

Graphnet's Community system provides healthcare professionals that work outside of hospital or GP environments with the ability to access up to date information about their patients wherever or whenever they need it. At the heart of all Graphnet systems is our dedication to the security, accuracy and availability of appropriate clinical information at the point of care. This availability of clinical records allows healthcare professionals to make informed decisions about their patient's treatment, whilst also improving both patient experience and safety.

The system was designed with the help of practising healthcare professionals. It allows users to record treatment details and view this in conjunction with test results and clinical data from GP systems, acute organisations, national programme services, social services and community hospitals. This provides a holistic view of a life-long patient record. Subject to a rigorous role based access security control (RBAC), the resulting patient centred record is then viewable by all relevant healthcare professionals involved in the patient's care.

The system is pragmatic, flexible and adaptable and can interoperate with the CfH reference solution complementing and enhancing its clinical functionality. The Graphnet Community system is modular based and can be introduced incrementally to meet the needs and priorities of individual organisations. Based upon a single patient/service user centred care record with features that support care across all the caring professions and a technology platform that is fully web-based, it can be deployed anywhere, without the need to 'rip and replace' existing systems or infrastructure.This reduces abortive spend and maximises return on investment on legacy systems.

User Identified Benefits

Users have identified the main benefits of the Community system as:

• Improved patient information at the point of care
• Greater sharing of information between services i.e. acute trust and GP's surgeries, which makes for optimum patient care
• Fast and easy access to a more comprehensive patient record
• No need to transfer notes from clinic to clinic
• No lost notes
• A paper-light system
• Improved data protection
• Clear, readable and auditable notes
• The use of drop-down boxes with pick-lists allows for effective audit in areas previously unclear
• Good clinical decision-making at the point of referral with all relevant information available electronically
• Reduction in unnecessary hospital admissions due to relevant information being readily available
• Design of electronic notes challenges processes and gives the opportunity to record information in a more professional and concise way
• Information only has to be entered once and is immediately available for all those with permission to view, therefore reducing duplication
• The sharing of hazards and potential or managed risks increases safety to both staff and patients
• GP's continue to use their system of choice

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