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Dyneley House Surgery, a semi-rural practice in the market town of Skipton, North Yorkshire, is pioneering the use of SystmOne GP in its region. The practice, which has 11,500 patients on its books, went live on SystmOne in April - the first practice in the former Craven, Harrogate & Rural District PCT, now part of North Yorkshire and York PCT, to do so.

"All of our staff were involved in the decision over which system to choose," says Practice Manager, Lynn Knowles. "We had internal demos of SystmOne and EMIS, and there was only one question at the end - 'When can we have SystmOne?'"

The surgery is unusual in that its patients cross PCT boundaries, with patients registered with North Yorkshire FSA, Bradford and East Lancashire. "90% of our patients go outside of our PCT boundary to go to hospitals," says Lynn. "SystmOne is good for us because it follows our patient flow. Acute trusts, community physicians, child health and out-of-hours services in the region all use SystmOne. That's a huge benefit."

IT manager, Heidi Edmondson, agrees, "If a patient is seen in another unit, we know about it instantly, which is amazing from a patient care point of view. We've had cases where the full patient record comes through instantly on registering a new patient. That's ideal for a clinician - they can see what's happening for themselves, rather than rely on what the patient can tell them."

As an already paperless practice, Dyneley House's deployment had unique challenges: "We've been letter scanning since the mid-90s," says Lynn. "The size of our scanning data was as big as our patient data - we had over 90Gb of data to transfer!"

In addition to the large amount of scanning data, Dyneley House also required a lot of data to be transferred that wasn't Read coded. "We wanted to know whether TPP and the LSP had migrated any other large practices from the same legacy system as we used - they had in a different area. I had a long conversation with the Practice Manager at that other surgery and was impressed with how it had worked for them. We knew that we would be more awkward though, because we had a lot of data that wasn't Read coded."

Lynn continues: "The deployment was well-planned, and the data migration went well. We did a lot of data checking and we were well supported by TPP, CSC, the PCT, and SHA."

Lynn has this advice for other organisations making the move to SystmOne: "We went live on a Friday and then needed to input the data we'd created since the final cut was taken - it was invaluable to us to have some patient downtime and be able to use that time to get up to date, and to get to grips with the system. We used that time as a training exercise. Everybody worked very hard over the weekend to make sure we were ready when the patients came through the door on the Monday morning. Since then, we've just been getting on with it!"

Looking to the future, Lynn says, "We're all learning, sharing our knowledge in-house, and finding ways of doing the things we want to do! We are looking forward to learning more about the system and to using SystmOne to analyse our data in order to improve data quality. Our clinical care has always been excellent but our data quality didn't match - now we hope to change that."

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