17 August 2007
Audley Mills Surgery, Eastwood Road, Rayleigh, has 18,700 patients on its
books and went live on SystmOne on 6th July 2007, the 50th practice in South
East Essex PCT to do so. Audley Mills is the largest practice in Rayleigh,
is within the commuter belt to London and has a semi-urban affluent population,
with a mixture of patients including many families with young children.
With 50 out of 69 GP practices in South East Essex PCT now using SystmOne,
the majority of patients moving around the area have a SystmOne patient record
that can follow them and be available to clinicians immediately, improving
clinical decision-making and patient care.
The staff of 45 at Audley Mills moved from Vision to SystmOne because they are
a paper-free practice and needed a system that supports paper-free working. Steve
Doherty, Practice Manager, says, "With SystmOne, letters and other paperwork
can be scanned and attached to a patient's electronic record, making us a truly
paperless practice. In addition, as SystmOne is a centralised system, when a
patient moves from one practice to another, their record is transferred electronically
- there's no shifting of paper notes, which means notes aren't lost, delayed
or misfiled. And if a patient moves from another SystmOne practice to us, we
can register them and view their record straightaway, which has often already
been summarised. We saw the benefit of this within days of going live. And of
course, with the centralised system, we don't have to do the maintenance that
we used to, involving working late at night, or at weekends."
The practice was also impressed by the clinical and administrative benefits of
using SystmOne. Steve explains: "Every GP in the practice is computer literate,
which means everything goes onto the computer, again, helping us to be paperless.
From a QOF point of view, this makes the work a lot easier, data is Read coded
properly, and is accurate and relevant. The QOF functionality on SystmOne enables
us to see QOF information in the patient record and highlight issues when the
patient comes in. We also appreciate the appointments system - it's very easy
to see which clinicians are in and where the patients are."
Audley Mills is also using SystmOne to manage their workflow: "We don't have
an intranet and so have explored using SystmOne Tasks. We now use them extensively
for internal messaging," says Steve.
Changing computer systems is always going to be a daunting and disruptive task,
but Steve says, "The deployment process was good," says Steve. "My intention
was that it would go as quietly as possible, with little impact on the patients
and it did, so we were very pleased. Training has been very good, and we have
been very impressed with the training and support from TPP, CSC and the ESSA
trainers."
Audley Mills is a forward-thinking GP practice that has implemented many other
strategies to improve patient experience in addition to the installation of SystmOne,
as Steve explains: "We are going to be part of a local pilot for Anglia ICE,
ordering pathology tests and managing X-rays and patient notes. We've also done
a lot of improvements to the building which all benefit our patients - we've
changed the waiting rooms, changed our phone system, and installed Jayex boards.
We have a pharmacy which is open for 100 hours a week, and two-thirds of our
appointments are now 'book-on-day'. In addition, we are looking into the possibilities
of offering patients appointment booking over the Internet through SystmOne."
Looking towards the future, Steve says, "We didn't use Choose & Book on
our old system because it was very difficult, but we are looking to try it again
now we're on SystmOne. We are joining up with another four practices to form
a Practice-based Commissioning group, and we are looking into the options for
mobile working to allow our clinicians to work at home or at patients' homes.
We hope that SystmOne will be able to support us with all of these projects."
