Health secretary Jeremy Hunt on 17th January 2013 confirmed hospitals should be able to share digital data from April 2014, and to adopt paperless referrals from April 2015. Hunt also announced he wants the NHS to meet a series of deadlines towards having electronic records and communications in place by 2018.
Hunt detailed The NHS should go paperless by 2018 to save billions, improve services and help meet the challenges of an ageing population.
The announcement highlighted the progress made by King’s College Hospital Foundation Trust is making to become fully paperless. A key part of the Trust’s paperless strategy has been the implementation of Docman RMS to provide a fully electronic referral management and workflow solution. The drive from Clinicians to have the right information in the right place at the right time was a key driver behind the progress made by King’s. A key part of their strategy is to address the way they handle referrals. The Trust receives referrals in a variety of ways, through email, post, fax and Choose and Book. These are now all are captured by Docman RMS to deliver a fully electronic process throughout the organisation.
Dr Glyn Hayes, Clinical Director, PCTI “The PCTI solution combines increased efficiency and reduction in cost while at the same time improving the information available to clinicians so improving individual patient care!”
Becoming paperless in an organisation
The Docman RMS solution, as championed by King’s College NHS Foundation Trust enables an organisation to electronically manage all of their referrals, reduce back office administration processes and allow ease of access to referrals for clinicians. An electronic process streamlines pathways, provides consistent times of referral to booking and provides management data to improve and report on processes. Using this intuitive software platform, Trusts can at the touch of a button know exactly where in the ‘system’ a referral is providing a responsive service to external organisations whilst processing referral within hours and subsequently offering a larger window to book appointments. A paper-based document can only be in one place at one time and seen by one person at a time.
The Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust is the latest Trust to sign up to Docman RMS to manage and workflow all incoming referrals electronically following King’s College NHS Foundation Trust and Worcester Acute Hospitals NHS Trust.
Paperless communication between organisations
If the physical document is transferred between healthcare organisations, it is a costly and time consuming process. As part of a key driver to become paperless, 75 organisations have taken the EDT Hub route, enabling the efficient delivery of millions of items of electronic clinical correspondence between primary and secondary care. Millions of patient clinical correspondence between secondary, primary and social care providers is now electronic, following 75 provider organisations taking PCTI’s electronic document transfer Hub.
To arrange a meeting to discuss becoming paperless, please contact us by telephone on 01977 664496 or by email to edt@pcti.co.uk