PCTI are pleased to announce the award by the National Integration Centre and Assurance (NICA) Technology Office for the accreditation to the Interoperability Toolkit (ITK) standards. PCTI’s electronic document transfer solution, compliant to ITK standards, offers greater flexibility within a Trusts IT infrastructure to achieve interoperability status.
The system provides a working solution that can be deployed very quickly across many differing systems to enable documents to be delivered electronically to any GP practice. The standards ensure PCTI’s EDT functionality is scalable across the NHS to maximise on the cost savings associated with transferring documentation to GP practices.
The Toolkit specification, created by the Technology Office, is a set of technical and governance standards and frameworks for interoperability. It covers transactional and analytical services aimed at accelerating the pace of delivery and is in line with the Department of Health’s strategy to ‘connect all’ rather than ‘replace all’, as outlined in the recent White Paper, ‘Equity & Excellence: Liberating the NHS’.
PCTI’s role was to communicate with ITK middleware and make documents available at the GP practice. EDT hooks into current processes within GP practices, delivering an electronic document into the centre of the GP’s current business process that is the Docman workflow. The solution ensures an easy transition from receiving hard copy letters to electronic copies.
Philip Young, director at PCTI, “documents are received by the GP practice via EDT for Docman and can be work-flowed around practices using Docman. We have found practices embrace it, not only because they receive correspondence much quicker but also because embedded data allows auto-patient matching and filing into the clinical record with minimal user intervention.”
PCTI recently announced the offering of £3million of free software for GP Practices. The EDT software normally sells for £750 per GP practice and represents an overall saving to the NHS of more than £3million. When documents are sent via PCTI’s EDT Server, practices can save further costs and maximise on data quality.