During November 2012, millions of items of electronic clinical correspondence were delivered across England and Scotland using PCTI’s EDT Hub. Numerous Trusts across the UK realised significant cost savings using this solution, including NHS Tayside who sent over 153,000 items in the month and NHS Eastern and Coastal Kent delivering almost 60,000.
In September 2009 EDT Hub was implemented at NHS Tayside as part of NHS Scotland’s National deployment. Lesley McLay Chief Operating Officer, NHS Tayside, said “We are now recognising many of the benefits attributed to putting EDT in practice such as improved patient safety, improved patient information quality and cost savings. NHS Tayside is now processing over 150,000 documents a month within 8 document sources ranging from the Out of Hours Episodes, Immediate Discharge Letters and Lab Results.”
Dr Beena Raschkes, GP & Joint Clinical IT Lead NHS Tayside “EDT has made a huge difference. Letters arrive promptly, are legible, complete , clear, concise, contain much more useful information, do not get lost either in the hospital or the practice , and most importantly it has radically improved patient care and communication about the patient and the care they have received and need and medication changes ”
“The most powerful example was an elderly lady being discharged home with multiple medications. Her Daughter was very concerned as her mother had a poor memory, and needed a prompt to take medication. The discharge letter was sent through EDT at lunchtime, I spoke to the daughter later that afternoon, rationalised her medication, issued a script, pharmacy collected it that afternoon and the drugs were delivered the next morning. With the old paper discharge letter we probably would never have received it , and it would still be in her handbag, on her mantelpiece!”
University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust recently documented their savings, Dean Grinham, IT Head of Programme Delivery “The cost of sending paper to GP practices at a minimum is 50p per item, without taking into account paper, envelopes, printing, and the time to do this process means that the Trust could save a minimum of £10,000 each month.”
“We have a process in place so that before a patient is discharged, the discharge letter must be completed. Some practices in the area are collecting from the Hub every 15 minutes; this means that a GP could be reading the patient letter before the patient has even reached the lift to exit the Hospital.”
Ric Thompson, Managing Director, PCTI “We are delighted by the significant impact that EDT Hub has made to the NHS enabling near real-time delivery of patient related clinical correspondence at a fraction of the cost of paper and ‘snail mail’ to the NHS and how documents are processed between care providers. We now have over 5,500 GP practices using Docman to process, OCR and workflow their clinical correspondence and this is where the benefits of joining EDT Hub and Docman go through the roof. We have practices consistently reporting as much a 50 seconds time saved per processing of a Document through the auto-patient matching and pre-populated filing fields, this really starts to mount up when you consider how many of these documents a busy Practice has to manage”.
EDT Hub now allows for multi-directional document transfer, enabling organisations to send and received documents electronically, furthering the scope to deliver paper free health care.
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About PCTI
PCTI is a market leading supplier of Electronic Document Management, workflow and messaging software to the Healthcare sector. The company provides solutions into both primary and secondary care with more than 5500 GP practices processing nearly 3 million physical and electronic documents per week and holds detailed records for over 20 million patients. EDT Hub is used in over 75 Secondary Care settings within the UK for joining-up health communities and professionals.